The 1880s in Spain were a period of rapid industrial growth and overall agricultural prosperity. British and French capital flowed into the mining industry and turned the country into one of Europe’s leading producers of iron and copper. The development of Cuba as a market for cheap textiles served to buoy up the Catalan cotton industry, and when the French vineyards were nearly destroyed by the phylloxera virus, Spanish wines enjoyed a brief period of supremacy on the world market. With the coming of the 1890s, however, economic growth became spotty, broken by ominous years of stagnation and decline. If the earlier upswing had brought some limited benefits to the urban and rural working classes, the decline was agonizing for them. What tormented the country were the contrasts between rich and poor. At the one extreme, Spain seemed to have plunged into a world of feverish business in which the wealthy classes were occupied with amassing immense fortunes, while those below lived in chronic destitution, misery, and hopelessness.

This contrast grated against the senses in all the cities of Spain and much of the countryside. In Barcelona, while the textile manufacturers began to raise sumptuous neo-Baroque dwellings on the Tibidabo, the slums of the workers spread outward, joining the hovels of the newly arrived Murcianos on the outskirts of the city. Machinery cancerously invaded the traditional universe of the small workshop and threw thousands of craftsmen onto the labor market, skilled workers whose occupations that had been rendered useless by mass manufacture. Even more offensive were the startling economic disparities that prevailed in the south. In many provinces of Andalusia, half the land was held in estates of 5,000 acres or more, while 80 percent of the population was made up of rural landless proletarians. Deficiency diseases from poor nutrition were endemic. The death rate soared. The ruling classes made no effort to provide the people with an education: more than half the men and nearly all the women were totally illiterate.

In addition, the greatest pains were taken to exclude the urban and rural masses from any role in governing the country. Between the 1830s and 1860s, Spanish political life had swung like a pendulum between fairly authentic Conservative and Liberal regimes, presided over by generals, civilians, and, in the late years of Isabella’s reign, by a court camarilla of priests. But with each oscillation the Conservatives became more liberal and the Liberals more conservative. The two factions were drawn together by a common fear of clerical, military, and radical uprisings. With the premature death of Alfonso XII in March 1885, the Conservative and Liberal parties of the Restoration period came to an agreement to share the state between themselves. A political system of Turnismo, or “rotation” was established in which the Liberal Party, under the ebullient Praxedes Sagasta, was given the reins of power whenever democratic window-dressing was needed to absorb social unrest or justify the passage of repressive legislation. The Conservative Party, led by Antonio Canovas del Castillo, occupied the ministry under conditions of relative stability. Except for an anticlerical tradition and an interest in secular education; the Liberals were indistinguishable from their Conservative , counterparts. What really distinguished the two parties were the agrarian strata whose interests they reflected: the Conservatives spoke fox’the Andalusian landowners and the Liberals for the Castilian wheat growers.

The chief architect of Turnismo was Canovas, a thorough cynic who combined political astuteness with a broad cultural background almost unmatched by any leading politician of his day. Before entering politics, he had already achieved a reputation of high standing as a historian. Canovas’s policy was directed toward the single goal of public order at any cost. This policy of deliberate political stagnation rested in turn on a massive system of corruption in almost every sphere of life. In theory, the Spanish government was a constitutional monarchy based on a limited (later,universal) suffrage with the usual rural caciques and urban jefes who tailored the vote according to the needs of Madrid. The nominally free press was bought off (almost any prominent journalist had no difficulty obtaining a seat in the Cortes),while the generals were mollified by adventures in Morocco.

The problem of dealing with the bourgeoisie was more complex. Spanish industry had developed not in Castile or Andalusia but on the periphery of the country, in Catalonia and the Basque provinces, the two regions which had been traditional opponents of a centralized state. Somehow, Turnismo had to reflect the interests of the strategic industrial bourgeoisie without giving it too much authority in the management of the state. The problem was solved by subterfuge. A pplitical underground of intrigue and pressure groups developed in which the economic demands of the manufacturers were granted after exasperating negotiations and maneuvers. Power, however, continued to rotate between the two large agrarian groups.

By the 1890s, the absurdity of this political structure was evident to almost everyone. In a period of unprecedented industrial growth, the state apparatus was owned and occupied by archaic agrarian interests, thus compelling the “progressive” manufacturing classes to enter it through the back door like beggars. The largely republican petty bourgeoisie was asked to be content with a monarch as the chief tenant and accept a rigged system of elections that effectively denied its entry. The working class and rural poor were simply ignored. Virtually excluded from active political life, they were given the nominal right to bed themselves in “legal” unions which were consistently harassed by the police and destroyed outright when they became too large.

The unions tried earnestly to accommodate themselves to this arrangement. The Workers’ Federation, as we have seen, foundered in its effort to promote legal unionism. It was doomed by the mere fact that it attracted large masses of Andalusian laborers. A more cautious strategy was tried in 1881, the same year that the Workers’ Federation was founded, when the Autoritarios of the Old International established the Spanish Socialist Party.[12] Although Marxian in rhetoric and organizational structure, it was basically reformist in politics and goals. What probably rescued the party from the fate of the Anarchists were the modest demands of its program, the prudent nature of its tactics, the respectable form of its propaganda. The party soon found itself traveling in a vicious’ circle. On the one hand, its program and tactics evoked little response from the restive Murcianos and braceros, who flooded into the Anarchist unions. On the other hand, the skilled workers to whom it appealed, being bourgeois in outlook and political sentiment, placed their confidence in the Republican parties.

Hence it was not until 1888, seven years after the founding of the party, that the Spanish Socialists succeeded in establishing their own labor union, the General Union of Workers or Union General de Trabajadores (UGT). Guided by Pablo Iglesias, this cautious, stolidly bureaucratic labor organization made headway among the industrial workers of the Basque cities, the craftsmen of Madrid, and the peasants of Castile. It later developed a large following in Granada, the Andalusian province which Brenan regards as more “Castilian” than any other in the south. The influence of the Socialists on the rebellious miners of Asturias and the Rio Tinto (Anarchist competition was strong in both areas) is more difficult to explain, although it was probably due to conjunctural factors rather than reformist, inclinations among the miners themselves. In any event, growth was slow and the UGT numbered less than twenty-five thousand members at the turn of the century, more than a decade after its founding. The union did encounter local hostility in its organizing drives. But it inspired very little fear in the government and escaped the repression that finally shattered the Workers’ Federation.

To the European Anarchists of the late nineteeenth century, the ruling classes seemed more firmly in the saddle than ever. An oppressive atmosphere of bourgeois egotism had settled over life. Everything seemed to acquire a dull, gray, tasteless appearance. And Europeans of sensibility were repelled by the smugness and banality of the age. The spirit of revolt, blocked by the massive stability of fin de siecle capitalism, began to burrow into the underground of this society. Arthur Rimbaud’s poetic credo of sensory derangement, Toulouse-Lautrec’s provocatively “lumpen” art, and the flouting of middle-class conventions by Oscar Wilde and Paul Gauguin reflected the compulsion of writers and artists to provoke the bourgeois, to cry out against the deadening complacency of the period. A literary and artistic Anarchism emerged which included men like Barres, Mallarme, Valery, and Steinlen, in whom generous ideals for the liberation of humanity were marbled with a furious anger toward bourgeois mediocrity. The effect of these cultural rebels on the social life of the time was virtually nil. At best, the bourgeois greeted them with scandalized outrage; more commonly they were met with uncomprehending indifference.

There were also some individuals whose desire to provoke led them to terrorist actions. These men were not ignored. They often came from the lowest strata of the working class and petty bourgeoisie—true Desheredados, their lives crippled by poverty and abuse. A few—Auguste Vaillant, for example, who exploded a bomb in the French Chamber of Deputies—were members of Anarchist groups. The majority, like the Frenchman Ravachol, were soloists. They called themselves “Anarchists,” but belonged to no group, for the word had by this time become a synonym for “terrorist.” The identification of Anarchism with terrorism was the result not merely of earlier bombings but of a new emphasis in libertarian circles on “propaganda by the deed.”

The disappearance of the Bakuninist International after the Verviers congress of 1877 left behind small, isolated Anarchist groups all over Europe. Many of them lacked any strategy for revolutionary change; their members could oppose the entrenched power of the state with nothing but their writings and speeches. The growing Socialist movements of the day were utterly repellent. Authoritarian in structure and reformist in goals, they seemed to embody the pedestrian bourgeois spirit of the era.

It was in this atmosphere, at a time of defeat and growing hopelessness, that a bold act in Russia illumined the way. On March 1, 1881, on the banks of the Catherine Canal in St. Petersburg, a small terrorist organization, the “People’s Will,” succeeded in assassinating Czar Alexander II. A politically hybrid group with strong Anarchist leanings, the band of young revolutionaries had publicly sentenced the Czar to death in 1879 and tracked him for two years until they were successful. The duel between a handful of terrorists and the massive Russian state had fascinated the world—and had brought the Czar .to the point of nervous collapse.

The assassination electrified Europe. Shortly afterwards, when an international congress of Anarchists and left-wing Socialists convened in London, one of the main topics to be discussed was “propaganda by the deed.” The delegates concluded that “a deed performed against the existing institutions appeals to the masses much more than thousands of leaflets and torrents of words....” Much discussion centered on “chemistry.” It was resolved that “the technical and chemical sciences have rendered services to the revolutionary cause and are bound to render still greater services.” Hence affiliated groups and individual supporters were asked to “devote themselves to the study of these sciences.”

Among the supporters of the new tactic was a young Russian prince, Peter Kropotkin, who had broken with his class and entered the Anarchist movement. Although temperamentally the very opposite of Bakunin, Kropotkin shared the deep humanity of his predecessor. Despite his aristocratic lineage—or perhaps because of it—he spent two years .imprisoned in the dreaded Peter and Paul Fortress for his ideals. His dramatic escape and his distinction as a geographer gave him an international reputation. By the time of the London congress, Kropotkin had become the outstanding spokesman for “Anarchist Communism,” a theory he advanced with great ability against the prevalent “collectivism” of the traditional Bakuninists.

Bakunin, it will be remembered, believed that the means of life individuals receive under Anarchism must be tied to the amount of labor they contribute. Although they are to receive the full reward of their labor, the quantity of what they receive is determined by the work they perform and not by their needs. Kropotkin did not differ with Bakunin’s overall vision of a libertarian society. He too believed that it would mean a stateless society of free, decentralized communes joined together by pacts and contracts. What distinguished him from Bakunin was his insistence that directly after the revolution each commune would be capable of distributing its produce according to need. “Need will be put above service,” he wrote; “it will be recognized that everyone who cooperates in production to a certain extent has in the first place that right to live comfortably.” Underpinning this view was the conviction that technology had advanced to a point where everyone’s’needs could be satisfied. The famous communist maxim, “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs,” would be the rule for guiding distribution immediately after the revolution.

Kropotkin, it has been claimed, favored a purist Anarchist elite and rejected the Bakuninist demand for a close linkage between Anarchist groups and large mass organizations. This is not quite true. In a dispute with a number of Italian Anarchists who advocated a strictly conspiratorial type of organization, Kropotkin insisted,that the “small revolutionary group” has to “submerge” itself in the “organization of the people,” a view that closely parallels Bakunin’s organizational ideas.

The difference between Bakunin’s and Kropotkin’s organizational views turned primarily around the issue of “propaganda by the deed.” As Max Nomad observes:

That tactic had not been in the armory of the Bakuninists; they believed that the masses were essentially revolutionary, and hence needed no terrorist fireworks to stimulate their spirit of revolt. All that was necessary, according to Bakunin, was an organization of conspirators, who at the proper moment would capitalize on the revolutionary potential of the m.asses. That view was no longer shared by Kropotkin and his friends. It was replaced by a sort of revolutionary “education” of the masses through acts of revolt, or “propaganda by the deed.” Originally that sort of “propaganda,” as first discussed at the Berne Congress of the “Anti-Authoritarian” International (1876), referred to small attempts at local insurrection. Somewhat later—after such actions had proven to be quite ineffectual—the term was applied to individual acts of protest.

None of these ideas had any significant effect on Spanish Anarchism until well into the 1880s, when translations of Kropotkin’s works were made available. At this time, Italian Anarchist Communist emigres in Barcelona began to promote the purist approach to organization and emphasize the importance of terrorist actions. The bitter controversies among Spanish Anarchists over the new ideas and tactics partly accelerated the breakup of the Workers’ Federation.

When the once-promising Workers’ Federation dissolved in 1888, its place was taken by a strictly Anarchist organization and by ideologically looser libertarian trade unions. The former, the Anarchist Organization of the Spanish Region, was founded at Valencia in September 1888 and consisted of several libertarian tendencies, mainly Anarchist Communist in outlook. The base of this movement was organized around the tertulia: the small, traditionally Hispanic group of male intimates who gather daily at a favorite cafe to socialize and discuss ideas. Anarchist groups were usually larger and assuredly more volatile. They gave themselves colorful names expressive of their high-minded ideals (Ni rey, ni patria, Via Libre), of their revolutionary fervor (Los Rebeldes), or of their sense of fraternity (Los Afines). Like the tertulianos, they met in cafes to discuss ideas and plan actions. Such groups had already formed spontaneously in the days of the International, but the new Anarchist Organization consciously made them its basic form of organization. Decades later, they were to reappear in the FAI as grupos de afinidad (affinity groups) with a more formal structure. The great majority of these groups were not engaged in terrorist actions; their activities were limited mainly to general propaganda and to the painstaking but indispensable job of winning over individual converts.

The union movement, on the other hand, focused its energies on economic struggles, generally taking its lead from libertarian union officials. A number of these officials, anticipating the death of the Workers’ Federation, had decided to retain a loose relationship with each other which they formalized in 1888 as a Pact of Union and Solidarity of the Spanish Region. With the revival of the labor movement in 1891, the Pact of Union and Solidarity convened its first congress in March, attracting Socialists as well as Anarchists. Although the congress was held in Madrid, the new organization was primarily a Catalan movement, influenced by Anarchist collectivists and by militant syndicalists.

The Pact of Union and Solidarity was ill-fated almost from the start, for it emerged at a time when terrorist activity in Spain began to get underway in earnest. Although there had been no lack of bombings and assassination attempts in the 1880s, they had been isolated episodes, occurring as the background of a larger class struggle between unions and employers. The bombings that opened the 1890s were quite different. They exploded across the foreground of the struggle and were destined to become chronic in Barcelona. The first of these bombings occurred in the midst of a general strike for the eight-hour day which the Pact of Union and Solidarity had decided to call on May 1, 1891.

The strike began peacefully enough with a large rally at the Tivoli Theater in Barcelona, followed by a street demonstration down the famous Ramblas to the civil governor’s palace. On the following day, however, it began to take on serious dimensions. Many factories closed down and violent clashes occurred between workers and police. Characteristiclly the government responded to the situation with a declaration of martial law. (In Spanish, literally, a “state of war.”). The next day a bomb went off before the building that housed the Fomento del Trabajo National (the “Encouragement of National Labor”, a euphemism for the powerful, notoriously reactionary association of Barcelona manufacturers).

The strike was broken by violence and treachery, but from that point onward, bombings became a commonplace feature of labor unrest in Barcelona. They were invariably followed by arrests and by beatings of imprisoned militants, yet the explosions themselves did very little damage. Generally, their timing and location were planned to pose the least possible threat to human life. The intention of the “terrorists” was apparently to frighten rather than to kill; indeed, it is not certain how many of these bombings were caused by Anarchists who were protesting against the real injuries inflicted by the authorities on imprisoned labor militants, or by agents provocateurs of the Fomento and the police.

The increasing drift of Spanish Anarchism toward terrorism was to be reinforced by an episode of agrarian unrest that became memorable in the history of the Andalusian movement. Its locale was Jerez, the center of the Desheredados and the alleged Mano Negra.

Anarchist ideas had taken root in this famous wine district early in the 1870s and, as we have already seen, held out tenaciously against the long years of repression initiated by Serrano. Pamphlets and periodicals sent by Anarchist emigres in the Americas kept alive the visions of the glorious spring of 1873 long after the movement elsewhere had dwindled to small groups and isolated individuals. The persecutions following the Mano Negra investigation did not extirpate the Anarchist groups in the district. On the contrary, the barbarities of the Guardia created pent-up feelings of anger and frustration that were certain to find release with the first revival of radical activity.

The revival began in 1890. On May 1 of that year, great demonstrations celebrating the labor holiday swept through Andalusia, bringing thousands of defiant workers and peasants into the streets. The astonished authorities took reprisals: bombs were conveniently “discovered” in the offices of El Socialismo, the Anarchist paper of Cadiz, and a new wave of arrests swept through the region. The persecutions continued into the next year when the authorities, invoking the discredited legend of 1883, imprisoned 157 Anarchists and labor militants on charges of being members of the Mano Negra. The outraged laborers waited nearly six months before responding to this and other provocations; then they exploded.

Toward midnight on January 8, 1892, a band of about five hundred vineyard workers, laborers, and a sprinkling of craftsmen marched into Jerez crying: “Long live anarchy!” “Death to the bourgeoisie!” “Long live the social revolution!” They were armed with pruning hooks, scythes, and whatever firearms they could gather. Outside, on the plains of Gallina and loitering on the road into the city were some thousands of men, ostensibly a reserve force, but actually stragglers who were too fainthearted to participate in the assault.[13] Precisely what the marchers hoped to achieve in the city is not very clear. There had been a great deal of revolutionary agitation in the area. Several suspicious outsiders, including a young man “from Madrid” (“El Madrileno”), had surfaced among the vineyard workers, calling upon them to prepare for a “social revolution.”[14] The vineyard owners were patently looking for a confrontation in order to suppress the unrest.

Once inside the town, the marchers broke up into small bands. Disoriented and confused, they were hardly a serious threat to anyone but the few stray passersby who fell into their hands. One group made off for the Jerez jail to free the militants who had been imprisoned as members of the Mano Negra. A single shot, presumably fired by the warden’s daughter, dispersed them. Others wandered through the city streets looking for “the bourgeoisie.” A few well-dressed people were stopped, insulted, and their hands examined for callouses. In the course of this enterprise, two clerks, mistaken for the class enemy, were killed.

During all of this, Civil Guards and cavalry had been carefully posted throughout the city waiting for orders to intervene. The authorities apparently knew all about the thousands on the plains of Gallina, the march ir\to Jerez, and the bands wandering through the nearly empty streets. They did nothing to stop them. With enough “incidents” to justify severe repression, the Guardia and cavalry were turned loose on the marchers who quickly dispersed into the countryside after some skirmishes. Despite the triviality of the whole incident, the police dealt with it as a major insurrection. Hundreds were rounded up and many savagely beaten. Sixteen men were tried and condemned to sentences ranging from ten years to life imprisonment. With incredible arrogance, the authorities placed Fermin Salvochea, the revered Anarchist “saint,” on trial before a military tribunal and charged him with inciting the Jerez uprising—this despite the fact that he had been locked up in the Cadiz prison throughout the entire incident. The officers unabashedly sentenced him to twelve years of hard labor. A few weeks later on February 16, the Anarchists Lamela, Busique, Lebrijano, and Zarzuela were taken out to the main square of Jerez and garroted before a large, silent crowd. They died defiantly, shouting “Viva la anarquia!” Before he was strangled Zarzuela delivered a prophetic injunction. “People of Jerez!” he cried from the scaffold, “Let no one say we die as cowards. It is your task to avenge us against this new Inquisition!”

With the repression of the Jerez uprising, terrorist activity reached a turning point: the garroting of the four Anarchists incensed revolutionaries throughout Spain and Zarzuela’s cry for vengeance did not go unheeded. Seven months later in Barcelona, a young Anarchist tried to assassinate General Martinez Campos as revenge for the Jerez executions. Two bombs were thrown at Martinez Campos, the officer whose pronunciamiento had paved the way for Alfonso XII and who now occupied the post of captain general of Catalonia. Martinez miraculously escaped serious injury, but the explosion killed a soldier and five civilian bystanders. The police quickly apprehended the assassin, Paulino Pallas, a young Andalusian Anarchist who had prospected in Patagonia with the famous Italian Anarchist Errico Malatesta. The Andalusian was tried by a court martial and sentenced to execution by a firing squad. From the opening of his trial to the moment of his death, Pallas’s behavior was defiant. Before the bullets claimed his life, he repeated the ominous cry of the south: “Vengeance will be terrible!”

The warning became a reality before the year was out. On November 7, during the opening night of Barcelona’s opera season, two bombs were thrown from the balcony of the Teatro Liceo into a gilded audience of the city’s most notable families. One of the bombs exploded, killing twenty-two and wounding fifty. Panic gripped the bourgeoisie. Unleashed to do their worst, the police closed all the workers’ centers and raided the homes of every known radical. Hundreds were arrested and thrown into the dungeons of Montjuich Fortress, the military prison overlooking Barcelona’s port area and working-class districts. Five Anarchists, innocent of the bombing, were sentenced to death and later executed.

The real assassin, Santiago Salvador, was not discovered until two months later. Salvador had been a friend of Pallas and was determined to answer his cry for vengeance. After failing at a suicide attempt on his arrest, Salvador succeeded in escaping the tortures that the police ordinarily inflicted on political prisoners by pretending to repent his act and feigning conversion to the church. For nearly a year his execution was stayed while Jesuits and aristocratic ladies petitioned the government for a commutation of sentence. When the young Anarchist finally stood on the scaffold, he abandoned his deception and died with the cry: “Viva la anarquia!”

Salvador’s death was followed by another round of bombings, arrests, and executions. To quell the Anarchists with a more effective counterterror, the government established a new unit, the Brigada Social, composed of specially assigned police ruffians. This new body of police was openly waiting for an opportunity to throw itself on the Anarchist movement—indeed, on all oppositional groups in Barcelona. There are, in fact, strong reasons for suspecting that it manufactured a provocation of its own three years after the Liceo bombing.

On June 7, 1896, while Barcelona’s Corpus Christi Day procession was wending through the Calle de Cambios Nuevos into the church, a bomb was thrown to the street from a top story window. The procession was led by the most important notables of the city, such men as the governor of Catalonia, the Bishop of Barcelona, and the new captain general, Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, whose cruelties in Cuba two years later were to earn him worldwide opprobrium. Yet with this alluring bait at the head, the bomb was aimed at the tail of the procession, whose ranks consisted of ordinary people. The explosion killed eleven and wounded forty. The assassin was never found. The bombing, however, provided Weyler with the excuse for rounding up not only Anarchists and labor militants, but Republicans and ordinary anticlericals as well. Over four hundred people were thrown into the Montjuich dungeons and left to the mercy of the Brigada Social.

When revealed in the press, the tortures to which these prisoners were subjected produced a sensation throughout the world. One of the victims, Tarrida del Marmol, an Anarchist of a distinguised Catalan family and director of Barcelona’s Polytechnic Academy, reported his eye-witness experiences in a book, Les Inquisiteurs de I’Espagne, that caused a shudder of horror north of the Pyrenees. The tortures were so severe that several prisoners died before they could be brought to trial. Men were forced to walk for days at a time without rest; others were hung from cell doors for hours while their genitals were twisted with ropes and burned. Fingernails and toe nails were pulled off and savage beatings inflicted mercilessly all over the body. After spending the greater part of a year in the prison fortress, ninety were brought to trial in the spring of 1897. Of twenty-six convictions, eight received death sentences and the remaining eighteen were given long prison terms. While the convicted men were obviously innocent, five were actually executed. Nevertheless, the vindictive Canovas regime had the acquitted prisoners rearrested and transported to the African penal colony of Rio d’Oro, the Spanish equivalent of France’s Devil’s Island.

Weyler’s attempt to crush oppositional sentiment in Barcelona backfired completely. Not only did he fail to extirpate the Anarchists, but a massive protest rolled in from Europe and South America. Mass meetings against the Montjuich atrocities were held in London, Paris, and other cities. Leading figures all over the continent expressed their outrage against the barbarities of Espagne inquisitorial. Despite its shortcomings, the closing years of the nineteenth century were a period when people could be genuinely angered by visible evidence of injustice.

Finally, on August 8, 1897, only a few months after the Montjuich trials, the terror reached the premier personally. Canovas was cornered on the terrace of a mountain resort in the Basque country by Michel Angiollilo, an Italian Anarchist, and shot to death. Although Angiollilo was garroted for the assassination, an unsuccessful attempt by the Anarchist Sempau, to kill Lt. Nardso Portas (one of the Civil-Guard officers who had presided over the Montjuich atrodties), ended in quite a different way. Despite the fact that his assassination attempt occurred only a month after the death of Canovas, the Montjuich atrodties had produced such a profound reaction of shock that no judge would convict Portas’s would-be assassin and he was released.

The men who performed these Anarchist atentados (as the terrorist acts were called) were not cruel or unfeeling like Weyler or Portas, wfco apparently relished their brutalities. The original bombings of 1891 and 1892 had been relatively harmless acts. They were obviously not meant to claim lives but to shatter bourgeois complacency and provoke a spirit of revolt among the workers. The lethal bombings that followed were reactions to the barbarities of the police and the state. The atentados had developed from opera bouffe into desperate acts of vengeance. Despite the terrible price they took in life and suffering, these terrorist acts served to damage the “Liberal” facade of Turnismo and reveal the cold despotism that lay “behind Canovas’s mockery of parliamentary government.

The Anarchists had been goaded from a generous humanism into a vengeful terrorism. The trend began early, as we noted, when the Internationalists, almost mortally wounded by the Serrano repression, established an “Avenging Executive Nucleus.” When the Cordobese section began complaining frantically to the Federal Commission about police repression, the answer it received is significant: “Take note of the names of your persecutors for the day of revenge and justice.” Actually, the “Avenging Executive Nucleus” and the Cordobese section did very little to even the score; the government and police invariably came out ahead. But a time would come when the names collected by the police would be matched by the lists prepared by their opponents; then, the firing squads of the Falange would be echoed by those of the FAI.

Yet one is compelled to ask if this bloody imagery, so common in most accounts of the Spanish Civil War, gives an accurate picture of the Spanish Anarchists. In a period when even the Spanish Sodalists began to succumb to the bourgeois spirit of the 1890s, the Anarchist movement was still developing individuals whose humanity and unaffected sympathy for the suffering of their fellow human beings has been aptly described as “saintly.” It is fair to say that the deep humanity that turned Pallas into a terrorist served to make a great Andalusian Anarchist Fermin Salvochea into a “saint.” The two men were counterparts, not opposites. Salvochea’s “saintliness,” moreover, had very earthly dimensions.

Fermin Salvochea was a man of broad culture, a rationalist and humanist whose parents had trained him for a business career, not a place in the church or the university. He was born on March 1, 1842, in Cadiz, one of Spain’s most important and thriving Atiantic ports, where his father had made a considerable fortune in commerce. At fifteen he was sent off to London to learn English and prepare for the business world. The five years he spent in London and Liverpool brought him into contact with radical literature. Thomas Paine’s critique of religion and Robert Owen’s communist theories influenced him profoundly. Before he left England in 1864, the young Salvochea had become a convinced atheist and communist. Once back in Cadiz, he became active in the Federalist movement, living frugally and devoting the greater part of his fortune to the revolutionary cause.

Soon he was participating in a host of remarkably audacious conspiracies. In 1866, for example, he plotted to free imprisoned artillerymen who had participated in a rebellion and were now awaiting deportation to Manila. Later, he tried to promote a military uprising in Cantabria. During the period of unrest that opened with Isabella’s flight from the country, Salvochea was elected to the revolutionary commune of Cadiz and became a commanding officer in the most radical detachment of the Republican militia. When Republican Cadiz was attacked by government forces, he characteristically held out to the last with a poorly armed band against the invading troops.

The courage of the man was extraordinary. When it finally seemed that resistance was utterly futile, he dispersed the militia and remained behind to assume personal responsibility for the uprising. His behavior gained the respect even of his enemies. Instead of executing Salvochea, the general sent him to the Fortress of San Sebastian as a prisoner of war. By this time, he was already idolized by thousands of poor in Cadiz. A few months later, while he was still in prison, they elected him to the Spanish Cortes. The Madrid government refused to recognize the election and Salvochea, denied his parliamentary seat, remained in jail. He was freed by the amnesty of February 1869. Eight months later, when Amadeo was offered the Spanish crown, Salvochea took to the field again, leading six hundred armed Republicans to a rendezvous with other forces from Jerez and Ubrique. They clashed with pursuing government forces near Alcala de los Gazules and were defeated after three days of fighting.

The rebels dispersed. Salvochea escaped to Gibraltar and finally made his way to Paris where he entered the radical milieu of the periodicals La Revue and La Repell. After a brief stay in London, the exile returned to Cadiz following the amnesty of 1871, there to be elected the city’s mayor. The Cantonalist revolts of July 1873 found Salvochea involved in an unsuccessful effort to bring Cadiz into the insurrectionary movement.[15] After suffering defeat, he again faced a court martial in Seville for rebellion. Condemned to life imprisonment in the African penal colony of Gomera, he now began to perform those self-denying services that make up the legend of the Anarchist “Christ.” He bore the sentence with calm and fortitude, sharing everything he received from his family with his fellow prisoners. When the governor of the penal colony read a pardon that his influential mother, aided by the Cadiz municipality, had finally obtained for him, Salvochea tore up the document and declared that there were only two ways he would leave prison: by an amnesty for all or by a revolt. Nine months later, he escaped and settled in Tangiers.

Until his imprisonment in Gomera, Salvochea was not an Anarchist, although he had a strong affinity for the libertarian movement. He belonged to the International almost from its earliest days in Spain, but it was only in the seclusion of the prison colony that he began to examine Bakunin’s theories with care. Having once adopted them, Salvochea became one of the most fervent Anarchist propagandists in Spain. He remained in the libertarian movement until the end of his life.

When Salvochea finally returned to Spain in 1885 after the death of Alfonso XII, it was during a time of intense Anarchist agitation in Andalusia. The libertarian press could now emerge legally and Salvochea established El Socialismo in Cadiz, spearheading the movement among the vineyard workers and braceros of southwestern Spain. He was arrested repeatedly, but his energetic defense in court proved more damaging to the government than any judicial impediments it could hope to place in his way. His practical abilities in the service of the movement were outstanding; it was Salvochea, apparently, who organized the great May 1 demonstrations that swept through Andalusia in 1890 and 1891. The Mano Negra case, followed by the “discovery” of two bombs in the offices of El Socialismo, led to widespread arrests throughout the region, and by 1892 Salvochea found himself in prison again. Despite the fact that he was in the Cadiz jail during the Jerez uprising, a court martial sentenced him to twelve years for his alleged role in the event. The civil courts had refused to try him, and Salvochea in turn refused to participate in the proceedings conducted by his military judges. Imprisoned in Valladolid, he was exposed to worse hardships than any he had suffered in the African penal colony. He was placed in solitary confinement and denied the right to write letters. The breaking point came when Salvochea refused the warden’s order that he attend mass. He was thrown into a damp, subterranean dungeon for months. Finally growing weak and despairing of release, he tried to commit suicide. This act was intensely human and understandable under the circumstances. It also disquieted the religious and most Christian warden. From that point on Salvochea’s prison life began to improve. After a while he was transferred to the jail in Burgos where he turned to intellectual activity, translating a work on astronomy and doing writing of his own.

In 1899 Salvochea was freed in the general amnesty that followed the protest over the Montjuich atrocities. He returned to Cadiz where he was welcomed with enthusiasm and resumed his activities in the Anarchist movement. Now nearly sixty, his health broken by years of imprisonment, he devoted most of his energy to literary activities. His last work was a translation of Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories, and Workshops, one of the most perceptive studies on the liberatory role of modem technology to emerge from the Anarchist movemept.

On September 8, 1907, Fermin Salvochea died in Cadiz, the gleaming white city he loved so dearly. Fifty thousand people, including hundreds from all over Spain, followed in the cortege to the cemetary. The greater part of this immense demonstration was composed of ordinary workmen of the Cadiz and Jerez area who had come to love this man for himself and as the embodiment of their hopes for a better world. As the coffin was slowly lowered into the grave, the great assembly of people, many in tears, suddenly raised their voices in a single, spontaneous cry: “Viva la anarquia!” This was a life that spanned the Anarchist movement in Spain from its beginnings to the point where it entered an entirely new phase—the period of Anarchosyndicalism.

Salvochea was a man of rare generosity and sympathy. Anarchists such as Manuel Buenacasa, a historian of the movement, speak of him as “nuestro santo mayor”—“our greatest saint”—and recall how he would often be found by his friends without a cap or a topcoat because he had given his own to the needy. He never married and he lived frugally. Yet Salvochea did not seek the ascetic’s mortification of the flesh, nor did he find exaltation in hardship. A serene man, he was rarely austere or somber. His demeanor toward his friends was affectionate, and toward his enemies he displayed an equanimity that verged on irony.

Terrorists such as Paulino Pallas and “saints” such as Salvochea were to persist into the 1930s as examples of the dual personality of Spanish Anarchism. As a curious mixture of pistolerismo and humanism they were to express the underlying tension that alternately divided the Anarchists and, in moments of crisis, united them in a zealous devotion to freedom and a deep respect for individuality. Perhaps no movement combined such conflicting tendencies in a fashion that served to fuel the enthusiasm and attract the devotion of the most dispossessed elements of Spanish society. Only the most deep-seated changes in the latter-day history of Spain were to erase the memory of the saints and terrorists from the popular legends of the peninsula. For better or worse, the tradition deeply affected the outstanding personalities of the movement itself and profoundly shaped its trajectory for nearly two generations.