Preparations for rising -- Activity of sections -- Commission of Twelve -- Want of union among revolutionists -- Les Enragés -- New class of middle-class property-owners -- May 31 -- Failure of insurrection -- Preparations for fresh revolt -- June 2 -- News of rising at Lyons -- Fury against Gironde -- Letter to Convention -- Speech of Marat to Jacobin Club -- Girondins join counter-revolutionists -- Convention outlaws Girondins Once more the people, in their sections, got ready for insurrection as on August 10. Danton, Robespierre and Marat held frequent consultations with each other during those days; but still they hesitated, and again action came from the "unknown ones," who constituted an insurrectionary club at the Bishop's Palace, and appointed a Commission of "Six" for that purpose. The sections took an active part in the preparations. The section of the Quatre Nations had already, in March, declared its...
The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936Preface These essays are less an analysis of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War of 1936-39 than an evocation of the greatest proletarian and peasant revolution to occur over the past two centuries. Although they contain a general overview and evaluation of the Anarchist and Anarchosyndicalist movements (the two should be clearly distinguished) in the three-year struggle at the end of the 1930s, they are not intended to be a full account of those complex events. It is no exaggeration to say that the Spanish Revolution was the farthest-reaching movement that the Left ever produced, for reasons the essays that follow will make clear. The Spanish proletariat and peasantry, led largely by Anarchist militants whose names will never be known to us, strained the limits of what we in the 1930s called "proletarian socialism" and went appreciably beyond them. Far more than the leaders of the Anarchosyndicalist National Confederation of Labor and the Iberian Anarchist Fede...