Eighty years. That is how long the anarchist seed, its sowing, and its harvest lasted, from the time that Giuseppe Fanelli, sent by Michael Bakunin, arrived in Spain in November 1868 until the exiles in 1939. Eighty years accompanied by frenzied propaganda, cultural and educational activity; by terrorism and violence; strikes and insurrections; failed revolutions and earthly paradises.

This anarchist presence has not been forgotten. Its legendary integrity, sacrifice, and spirit of struggle was upheld by its followers for several decades. Its enemies, on the right as well as left wing, constantly highlighted the anarchists' propensity for the bomb and the pistol. These are almost certainly exaggerated views that even those of us who often feed on these diametrically-opposed sources have maintained as historical doctrine.

Between the appearance of Fanelli and the time of Republic exile, following General Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War in April 1939, anarchism attracted a wide variety of popular sectors to its red and black flag. There was something unusual, exceptional, atypical in all this, since logically the “scientific doctrine” that the proletariat needed would have been socialism.

It was unusual because, more than anything else, this anarchism had taken root in Barcelona, Spain's most modern and industrial city, where organized socialism had never been able to gain ground. And therein lies its exceptional nature: it could not merely be explained as a phenomenon of primitive rebellion, of desperate peasants, of farming areas. And it was seen as unusual by socialists, communists and enlightened experts such as Díaz del Moral, Gerald Brenan, or Eric Hobsbawm.²

In fact, there were many other singular phenomena in Spanish contemporary history, such as republicanism, anticlericalism, (regional) nationalism, civil war, or coups d'état. Nor did socialism seem to be a great success in other countries: in western Europe, probably the most suitable comparative framework in which to place Spain, up until the First World War only a small proportion of workers belonged to socialist political or union organizations; and in electoral terms, only Germany had seen a consolidated popular socialist party with any influence.

This is why we should remember something that recent research seems to bear out: anarchism was not an “exceptional” and “extraordinary” phenomenon in the history of Spain, if by “normal” and “ordinary” we are referring what was happening in the rest of western Europe until well into the twentieth century, with the transition from anarchism to anarcho-syndicalism, from methods of organization based on groups of similar ideology to a more formal and disciplined structure. It was only with the founding and consolidation of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) as a popular movement in 1917–21 and 1931–37 that Spain started to be “atypical,” because it was then that, with the notable exceptions of Argentina and Sweden, revolutionary, antipolitical, direct-action syndicalism had disappeared from the rest of the world.

Up to this conversion to anarcho-syndicalism, Spain had experienced trends in worker collectivism that were very similar to those of France or Italy: adherence to Bakuninist ideas, the decline of the First International, the appearance of terrorism in the 1890s, and the expansion of the doctrine of revolutionary syndicalism in the early twentieth century. Neither was the CNT, founded in 1910, a strong, stable phenomenon: it was only firmly implanted during certain periods and, except in Catalonia and a few cities such as Seville or Zaragoza, shared the stage with the socialist trade unionism of the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT); this style of trade unionism also followed, until the Second Republic of 1931, the antipolitical and antistate tradition inherited from the First International.

But although it was unstable and less persistent than expected, dominated as it was by its lack of geographical and chronological continuity, anarchism made its presence felt, fading and reappearing, with its outbreaks of protest, its philosophy of liberty, the collectivisation of methods of production, the abolition of the State, or the organization of future society without coercion—objectives that were to be attained through antipoliticism and the rejection of electoral and parliamentary contests, the authentic trade mark of the movement.

It is some time now since José Álvarez Junco identified the two doctrinal currents that inspired this movement: liberal individualism and socialist communitarianism, two doctrines that were difficult to balance in practice despite their claims to natural harmony. At first glance, anarchism seemed to be a Utopia arising from the optimistic, harmonious philosophy of the Enlightenment which, as a child of the time in which it existed, maintained close bonds with the conspiracies and secret societies of a democratic radical nature, with federalism and romantic-populist doctrine. But at the same time, it went far beyond the ideas of liberal rationalism and republican populism, as shown by its desire to abolish the State, collectivize production and, especially, its antipoliticism, the authentic trade mark of the movement—the feature that was responsible for its break with a series of travelling companions, from federalists to socialists, as well as republicans.⁴

The type of anarchism that triumphed in twentieth-century Spain, now closely linked to revolutionary syndicalism, was one of “communitarianism” and “solidarity,” relying on the popular masses to bring about the success of the revolution. Without that support of a broad spectrum of society, it would never have become a mass movement; it would have been merely a useful ideology for a few rebellious individuals, revolutionary but fragile, dwarfed by the growth of socialism and relegated to verbal violence. But its history was also associated with the bomb and the pistol, the sinister figures of men in black capes clutching sticks of dynamite, gunmen, rabid anticlerics, and the avengers of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI).⁵

In this paper, the reader will notice the ambivalence of this double face which may be taken to either extreme, as contemporaries did and we historians do today, although I shall be concentrating on the various examples of anarchist violence, from terrorist action in the 1890s to anonymous bombs of the first decade of the twentieth century; from the tyranny of the Star pistol in the 1920s to the uprisings and revolutionary terror of the Second Republic and the Civil War. At any event, what follows is a story that is contradictory, heroic, and menacing.⁶

Propaganda by Deed

When the Bourbon Restoration brought an end to the liberal and republican order of 1868–1874, the Federación Regional Española (FRE), the formal organization of the First International in Spain, set up in the June 1870 Congress, was harshly repressed, and it went through a stage of going underground, disorganisation and arguments about what tactics were more suitable, either legitimate or violent, for attaining their revolutionary objectives.

The FRE did not last very long after the Republic was ousted by force, but it set up a network of workers' societies, especially in Catalonia and Levante, distributing pamphlets and newspapers, and gained a prominent place in the public awareness, giving rise to uneasiness among law-abiding people and optimistic expectations among the working classes.

This fusion between workers' associations, pre-trade-union forms of resistance, and anarchist political thought was allowed to return to the scene very soon in 1881, when the liberal Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, with royal consent, replaced Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in the Government. The new freedoms for the workers' associations brought about the rebirth of the International, something which made a great many people nervous, under the name of the Federación Regional de Trabajadores de la Región Española (FTRE). By that time, internationalism in Spain was deeply split, after it had played a part in the 1872 controversy that had created enmity between the followers of Marx and those of Bakunin in the Asociación Internacional de Trabajadores (AIT). This split gave rise to the two factions that were to typify the workers' movement in Spain up to the Civil War.⁷

The mixture of legality and clandestinity was part and parcel of the anarchist political and organizational pattern in Spain during its early years of expansion. “I think we need two organizations, one above board, broad-reaching, working in the open; and the other secret, active,” wrote P. Kropotkin in 1881.⁸

But this does not mean, as is often held, that anarchism was always a murderous ideology. In fact, after twenty years of the International in Spain, with short periods of legality and long stages of underground activity, there had been very few assassinations, in spite of what the authorities would have the people believe.

However, everything changed in the 1890s, when the violent tendency came to the fore, encouraged by the currents in European anarchism that favored “propaganda by deed,” a term that in its early days meant insurrection against the army and capitalism, rather than political assassination. “Propaganda by deed” was a desperate attempt by the international anarchist movement to escape isolation. Terrorism accompanied the disorganization and clandestinity of the anarchists, and flourished in the years when the workers' organizations were in decline, a situation caused by the brutality and inflexibility of the authorities, which fuelled the arguments of those in favour of violence, of doing more than just talking or writing, and of “placing chemistry at the service of revolution.”⁹

The terrorism aspect was a phenomenon that produced many more victims of greater significance beyond Spain's frontiers, including President Carnot of France (1894), Elizabeth, Empress of Austria (1898), King Umberto of Italy (1900), and President McKinley of the United States (1901). Also from beyond Spain's borders were some of the terrorists who were active there, such as Angiolillo, Thioulouze, Ascheri, and Girault. But terrorism also left its mark in Spanish society, with major actions such as the Liceo bomb outrage in 1893; the bomb thrown into the Corpus Christi procession in July 1896; and the assassination of Prime Minister Cánovas del Castillo in August of the following year.

Many of these actions were revenge attacks, reprisals against an authority that tortured and sentenced to death people who had nothing to do with the attacks, an authority that indiscriminately arrested anarchists, republicans, free-thinkers without conceding them any rights, and this revived the spectre of the “Spanish Inquisition” and ensured that the fortress of Montjuich, a venue for torture and death, would pass into history as “the cursed castle.”¹⁰

Autumn 1893 saw the outbreak of the heaviest wave of action in Spain. On November 7, Santiago Salvador threw two Orsini bombs into the stalls of the Liceo, where the Barcelona opera season was opening with William Tell. The result was twenty-two dead, with scenes of panic and deep shock in the city. About one hundred anarchists were arrested and tortured in Montjuich. Some died in prison. Others, such as Borrás, committed suicide. By using torture, the police obtained five confessions of guilt, which turned out to be false, since on January 2, 1894, Santiago Salvador, who declared himself to be the sole perpetrator of the attack, was arrested in Zaragoza. He was executed, along with the other five, which shows the “effectiveness” of the antianarchist brigade that was set up after the massacre.

This brutal repression gave way to two years of calm until June 7, 1896, the Sunday after Corpus Christi, when another powerful Orsini bomb exploded in the tail end of the procession as it was going down the Calle Cambios Nuevos in Barcelona: twelve dead and forty-four injured. In spite of never finding the real perpetrator—thought to be the French anarchist, Girault, who fled to America—the police filled the gaols with anarchists, with indiscriminate arrests of militants who had been arrested before in 1893, free-thinkers and republican leaders. The campaign against the “cursed castle” escalated and in May 1897 five anarchists accused of being the perpetrators of the attack were executed. Three months later, Michele Angiolillo, an Italian anarchist who had lived in Barcelona, left London to enter Spain and proceeded to the spa at Santa Agueda, in the province of Guipuzcoa, where he shot the Prime Minister, Cánovas de Castillo, who died on August 8, 1897. The Spanish security services, who had been furnished with French reports that Angiolillo was coming to Spain to carry out a major assassination, once again demonstrated their ineptitude. Angiolillo was put to death by the garrotte in the prison at Vergara a few days later.¹¹

The police ineptitude aspect warrants a comment. In fact, only those who operated unmasked were caught, such as Angiolillo. Five people who had nothing to do with the case were executed for the Liceo bombing. Of the five who were shot for the Corpus Christi procession attack, only Tomás Ascheri, who had been a police informer, pleaded guilty. Before these executions took place, the police had needed to arrest hundreds of anarchists and republicans.

In the absence of an effective police force, there was the army, omnipresent in law and order and public security policy, and beneficiaries of the “abusive use” of the state of war and the constant suspension of constitutional guarantees. The leading anarchist attacks of the time were dealt with by the military and there were also courts martial that condemned so many innocent people. In the court martial to try those charged with the bomb attack in the Calle Cambios Nuevos, held in December 1896, the prosecutor asked for no less than twenty-eight death sentences. No wonder he uttered that famous statement: “overwhelmed by the number, I close my eyes to reason.”¹²

In fact, as a result of closing their eyes to reason, of arrests, tortures and executions, of passing repression of terrorism laws and fanning the legend of the “cursed castle,” the attacks stopped. And they stopped after the assassination of Cánovas, the politician who had constructed the political system of the restoration of the monarchy, as if such an assassination meant that, just as with the assassination of President Carnot in France three years earlier, the maximum objective had been achieved, because there was no longer anyone above him to kill at a time when, with a Queen regent, there was not even a king.

“Propaganda by deed” was, by the turn of the century, a thing of the past. Individual terrorist acts linked to anarchism disappeared with the assassination of Cánovas. It had lasted barely five years, and, as we have attempted to show, it only came about following the defeat and repression of successive legitimate projects in which the anarchists had put their trust. This was because government and employer intransigence in Spain did not allow for reform-seeking movements, and this also explains, although this was not the only reason, why the socialists were for a long time a sect, or why the anarchists ended up with innocent blood on their hands instead of setting up workers' groups. Violence was not a constant feature of anarchism in the first thirty years of its existence, but when it did appear, it did so as a “revolutionary” violence against what was emanating from bourgeois society and its tyrants. At least, that was the justification put forward by its instigators.

The Cánovas incident was not the only element responsible for the disappearance of “propaganda by deed” anarchist terrorism. One year after the assassination, the 1898 Crisis, symbolized in the lost of the last Spanish colonies, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, represented the first serious setback that the system he had forged was to suffer. Regenerationist projects were born, the republicans began to come out from under the stones, popular riots increased and the working classes found other forms of mobilization. The socialists and anarchists had taken over thirty years to see the light, to emerge from isolation and the consequences of intergroup differences. For this reason, in spite of the fact that Barcelona witnessed a new terrorist phase at the beginning of the twentieth century, consisting of indiscriminate bomb attacks, which led to it becoming known as “the bomb city,” there were other phenomena which were broader in aspect and caused more concern than terrorism: Alejandro Lerroux-style republicanism enjoyed sensational successes over longstanding candidates in the elections, and Catalonian workers' organizations found in the Workers Solidarity Movement new weapons for the struggle which had been tested beforehand by the French revolutionary syndicalist movement; the upshot of all this was the birth of the CNT in 1910.

The City of Bombs and Insurrection

The twentieth century dawned in Spain with extreme tension, resounding problems and the bitter aftertaste of the disastrous defeat of 1898. The industrial crisis, particularly keenly felt in the Catalonian textiles sector now that the Cuban market had been lost, gave rise to a good many labor disputes and strikes, harshly put down by the Civil Guard and the Police.

With the repression of workers' assemblies and strikes in Catalonia and many other towns and cities to which the labor disputes had spread, terrorism returned to Barcelona, but with features that were very different to those that had prevailed in the final years of the nineteenth century. Between 1904 and 1907, there were bomb explosions in squares, streets, markets, anywhere that they could be easily placed; responsibility for these incidents was never claimed by the anarchists, and indeed they either denied them, or attributed them to the police or to “reaction.” At any event, this was shady terrorism which, except for one or two cases, as Romero Maura points out, did not have any political objectives, aiming rather to create panic and disturbance.¹³

Apart from the bombs, there was at that time an attempt to kill the Prime Minister, Antonio Maura, in 1904, and two attacks against the new king, Alfonso XIII. In the second one, in May of 1906, on the day of the royal wedding between Alfonso XIII and the English Princess Victoria Eugenia of Battenburg, Mateo Morral threw a bomb wrapped in a bunch of flowers from a third-floor window of number eighty-eight Calle Mayor in Madrid while the royal coach was passing beneath. The royal couple was unharmed, but the device killed twenty-three and injured about a hundred others. Morral escaped, and in Torrejón de Ardoz, near Madrid, after killing a security guard, he committed suicide.

Joaquín Romero Maura holds the view that the idea of killing the king was “the doctorate of those supporting propaganda by deed,” but the anarchists do not seem to have put much effort into this action, dedicated as they were to other business. The terrorism at the end of the nineteenth century had caused them a lot of harm, sinking them into a period of disorganization, with scant representation among workers' associations. For them, the new century came in with a whimper, although if we look for other signs of life beyond formal organizations or institutions, we have a different picture. Here we have workers' societies, cooperatives, newspapers, lay schools and various manifestations of a popular culture, “basically antioligarchical and anticlerical,” in which republicanism and the workers' movement—anarchist or socialist—worked side by side. To put it another way, the anarchist tradition of federalism, anticlericalism and anticentral feelings was flourishing in Catalonian towns and cities in the first decade of the twentieth century. 1907 saw the birth of Solidaridad Obrera, a socialist initiative although with a strong anarchist influence, the forerunner of the CNT. This period also saw the emergence of Alejandro Lerroux, who caused all sectors of the working class to vote republican, and who practiced his anti-Catalonian nationalism in the heart of Catalonia. All this and a good deal more converged in the famous Tragic Week (Semana Trágica).¹⁴

The spark that ignited the conflict had little to do at the beginning with this emerging workers' movement or with Catalonia's political problems. It began as a result of economic and military pressure to increase Spain's presence in Morocco. The Prime Minister, Antonio Maura, made use of an attack by Rif tribesmen in the spring of 1909 to organize a punitive expeditionary force. Reserve troops were called up on July 11, 1909, and Barcelona was chosen as the port of embarkation, with a pomp which, in the words of Joan Connelly Ullman, seemed designed to “enflame the masses:” the troops marched round the working-class districts, with nobody making “any conciliatory gesture towards the reservists or their families, who were abandoned without any means of subsistence.” Instead, “the officers gave patriotic speeches while the high society ladies, whose sons could afford the 1,500 pesetas required to become exempt from military service, gave out religious medals.”

Tension became more pronounced on Sunday, July 18, when the troops marched through the center of the city to the port, at an hour when there were a good many people in the streets. The crowd surrounded the soldiers “who quickly broke rank to walk arm in arm with their family or friends.” When they got to the port, some of the soldiers threw their medals into the water, while shouts began to come from the crowd: “Throw away your rifles. Let the rich go, all or none. Let the monks go.”

A workers' committee called a general strike, which began in Barcelona on Monday, July 26. The general strike spread “like a string of fireworks,” according to the Civil Governor of the province, Ossorio y Gallardo, and took hold in several Catalonian cities. The Captain General, Luis de Santiago, declared a state of war. On the Monday night the first Church buildings were set on fire, which from that moment on was to become a feature of the days to follow: some fifty Church buildings were set alight, although there were few victims.

On Thursday, July 29, troops from Valencia and Zaragoza regained control of the city, in spite of resistance in the working class areas, where even field guns were needed. By Monday, August 2, it was all over. There were some 2,000 arrests, of which 600 were later to be found guilty. Fifty-nine people were sentenced to life imprisonment and seventeen to death. Only five were executed. The first to be shot, José Miguel Baró, was the only one who had anything to do with the leadership of the popular uprising. The last to face the firing squad was Francisco Ferrer i Guardia, on October 13. He was the founder of the rationalist Escuela Moderna, and was deemed to be “the author and head of the rebellion” in a military court that lacked any legal guarantees.

The execution of Ferrer, which had considerable international repercussion, was nothing less than an act of revenge to punish a revolutionary theoretician who had challenged the Church's control of education, not an anarchist leader of the popular uprising, something which he never had been.

The Semana Trágica had far-reaching consequences. The king lost faith in Maura, and his political career was over. The Church hardened its ultraconservative posture while the army reasserted itself in its ill-fated Moroccan venture which was to have so much influence on Spanish history in the following two decades. The socialists and the republicans emerged from their isolation, creating a “joint force” which led to Pablo Iglesias, the leader of the Socialist Party, being elected to Parliament. And the anarchists finally concentrated all their efforts on trade unionism by founding the CNT, an organization which in Catalonia was soon to become the trademark of the workers' movement.

With the birth of the CNT, anarcho-syndicalism made the transition to becoming an organization that was more disciplined and which involved the masses. The ritual discourse of clandestinity and the anarchist “subculture” gave way to that of the class struggle. Terrorism through bombs disappeared, as had individual assassinations carried out in the name of “propaganda by deed” before that, although the assassination of the Prime Minister, José Canalejas, in Madrid in November, 1912, had the flavour of nineteenth-century terrorism about it. Just one bomb went off in Barcelona in 1910, and not one in the five years following that. The violence that flourished later, at the end of the decade, had a different face and developed under very different circumstances, under the aegis of revolutionary syndicalism.

The Kings of the Working-Class Pistol

Although it was founded in 1910, the CNT did not manage to really get going until the years of the First World War, when the lack of repression enabled it to come out into the open. It was then that the main leaders of the movement, from Salvador Seguí to Joan Peiró, not forgetting Angel Pestaña, forged its ideology, which was consolidated in the Sants Conference, in 1918, and another Conference held in the Teatro de la Comedia in Madrid in 1919. It was there that the seal was set on its antipolitical and antistate character, its direct action syndicalism, independent of any political party, with the aim of transforming society through revolution.

1919 marked the high point of its expansion. This was the year in which the CNT, now organized into single-industry unions, achieved its highest pre-civil war membership: 700,000 members, more than half of them in Catalonia.

But it was not all a bed of roses for anarcho-syndicalism, and this union force also had to go through difficult times. Along with sackings, blacklists, mass arrests, and deportations, the usual methods for dealing with workers' demands, the harshest sector of the Employers' Federation began to think up other methods. They transformed the traditional somatén (militia) into a bourgeois urban militia, thereby hoping to wipe out revolutionary syndicalism without recourse to the army; they also financed bands of hired guns to do away with some of the CNT leaders.

The governments of the day also provided their contribution to violence by appointing Civil Governors, such as the Count of Salvatierra and especially General Martínez Anido, who closed down trade unions, imprisoned anything that moved, and were probably involved in the physical suppression of anarcho-syndicalist militants. Also appearing on this stage were the “kings of the working- class pistol,” to use anarchist Juan García Oliver's words, hardcore anarchists and underworld gunmen who profited from the trade union coffers and attacked employers, the authorities, and workers who did not agree with the tyranny imposed by the Star pistol. Thus were born, to close this spiral of violence, the sindicatos libres; which under the shelter of the authorities, especially in the period of Martínez Anido from November 1920 to October 1922, they fanned the flames of what Albert Balcells called “the spirit of blind reprisal” against the members of the CNT.¹⁵

Neither historians nor the large number of contemporary accounts can agree as to who struck first, although there are important features and aspects which should be borne in mind in order to paint a complete picture of these years of conflict. The confrontation between unions and employers, unions and the State, and the various forms of union organization can only be understood within the framework of far-reaching historical tendencies. The trade unions, as in other countries, grew and spread in Spain as a result of the development of industrial capitalism, of a work-based economy and the “urban explosion” of certain cities. But the strength and presence that they acquired from 1917 onwards was unprecedented: the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), after several decades of slow progress, had 200,000 members by 1920; and the CNT, a new organization, although including a few traditional roots, trebled trade-union membership. These were times of trade unionism, albeit in two different organizational forms, but they finished up producing similar class discourse and practices, solidarity, rhetorical images of social division. They turned the strike into a tool of the working class, in the belief that enough strikes would bring about the upturning of the capitalist social order and end up with the administration of society by workers' organizations.

Workers flocked in their thousands to these unions, at a time of political crisis, rising prices and deterioration in living conditions, with a good many labor disputes taking place, revolutionary hopes fuelled by the 1917 Russian revolution, and with the idea that union strength would make for successful strikes and keep intransigent bosses in line. And so the UGT flourished in some cities such as Madrid or Bilbao, while the CNT did so in others such as Valencia, Seville, Zaragoza, and especially Catalonia.

The events of 1919 in Barcelona were a perfect example, a pattern to be followed by all those interested in maintaining order or subverting it. In just a few months there emerged the leading players in a social drama that left its mark, the ingredients of an explosive mixture that went off time and again in that period.

The year began with a strike in the Compañía de Fuerza e Irrigación del Ebro, “La Canadiense,” the main producer and distributor of electricity in Catalonia. Now that the Great-War years of rich pickings and prosperity were over, the company tried to reduce wages. When some of the affected workers approached the CNT, they were sacked by the management. Thus the strike that followed these sackings was a labour dispute, but it also had the wider aim of getting the management to give full recognition to the trade union movement. The strike lasted forty-four days and the city of Barcelona came to a standstill. The Civil Governor, González Rothwos, demanded a harsh response. The Captain General of Catalonia, Lorenzo Miláns del Bosch, ordered the call-up of all the employees. The resistance to the call-up caused several hundred people to be thrown into prison. A state of war was declared. Constitutional guarantees had already been suspended on January 18, and were not restored until March 31, 1922.

The strike ended in March with an overwhelming victory for the workers, with Salvador Seguí and the CNT as heroes of the moment. But Miláns del Bosch refused to free all who had been arrested and anarchist action groups launched another general strike which made matters extremely complicated and detracted from this triumph of discipline and organisation. The somatén reappeared, now converted into a bourgeois civic guard, arming orderly citizens who felt unsafe with revolutionary syndicalism. And as if all these armed men were not enough, with up to eight thousand patrolling the streets of Barcelona in the spring of 1919, some employers organised their own security services. Foremost among these was the fake Baron de Koening, a German ex-spy, and the ex-policeman, Bravo Portillo, who started out as security guards and finished up by forming a band of gunmen to eliminate any trade unionists who got in the way of the employers.¹⁶

Anarchist violence, which had been contained by the discipline and successes of the trade unions, once more came to the fore, with more force than ever, encouraged by the power of collective action and by the fostering of direct confrontation instead of representation which was also fuelled by the employers and the system of public order of the Restoration. All parties believed in solutions involving force and there were all too many players who were prepared to move on to action. The Employers' Federation, which was now headed by extremist businessmen, decided to demolish the powerful trade union movement, and for this they had the backing of Miláns del Bosch, the somatenes, the paramilitaries, and the official forces of law and order.

The second Employers' Federation conference in October 1919 came to a decision: to destroy the workers' organization, liquidate it with a lockout that began on November 3 and was not to end until January 26 of the following year. They forced factories, workshops, and shops to close, using the paramilitary groups that had appeared in the spring. With no effective police or civil guard presence, the somatenistas came to the fore in the armed defence of order. They all turned the lockout, according to Soledad Bengoechea, into a “mobilizing myth.” In the streets, with their rifles on their shoulders, these “honorable citizens” were able to save civilization and order from the threats of revolution and Bolshevism.

1919 had started with a workers' strike and ended with an employers' lockout. In spite of all the struggles and tensions, it was not a year in which the pistol held sway extensively. Strikes and workers' demonstrations to secure union recognition still counted for more than terrorism by action groups. However, the wave of terrorism intensified in 1920 and did not stop until Primo de Rivera's coup d'état in September of 1923.

The record for violence on one side or the other was attained in Barcelona in 1921: 311 victims. Martínez Anido, the Civil Governor, and the Chief of Police, Miguel Arlegui, put into practice what will always be remembered as the “ley de fugas,” unpunished murder under the pretext that prisoners were trying to escape. Hundreds of CNT members were killed this way, including Evelio Boal, the secretary general of the CNT, who was taken out of the prison at two o'clock in the morning on June 12, to be gunned down in the street next to a police station. This was also the year of the Spanish rout at Annual in Morocco and the assassination of Eduardo Dato in Madrid, on March 8, a Chicago-style attack in which the anarchists, Mateu, Nicolau, and Casanellas shot him from a motorcycle with sidecar. “It was not Dato I shot, it was the politician who authorized the Ley de Fugas,” claimed Pedro Mateu on being arrested.

In short, the list of gunned down victims included employers, authorities, revolutionary unionists and members of the Sindicato Libre. The last big name to fall was Salvador Seguí, the most influential anarcho-syndicalist of the time, who was shot on March 10, 1923, a few months before General Primo de Rivera's dictatorship put an end to this terrorism on all sides.

What with terrorism from above and from below, from outside and within, the revolutionary syndicalist movement was left broken and in tatters. With the arrest of its moderate leaders, the unions began to be dominated by hardcore anarchists. The repression blocked any avenues of negotiation, removed the men at the helm, and left the organization in the hands of action groups, those who believed, as Angel Pestaña declared, that “preparing for the revolution meant spending all the Unions' funds to buy pistols.”¹⁷

But it was not only clandestinity and repression that caused and made for armed reprisals and anarchist violence. Very few actually pulled the trigger, the “select” groups that the anarchist Juan García Oliver referred to. But many were the unionists who gave instructions as to who the victims were to be. And there are clear signs, as Pestaña himself wrote, “that the authors of the attacks were supported and paid by the organisation.” Assassination became an “industry,” to use Meaker's expression. This was also a feature of the CNT's strength, using pistols in response to the employers, making deserters pay for their folly, exerting pressure on the undecided and on blacklegs. And as the CNT was being harassed, without political allies or sources of income, with hundreds of members in prison, a whole web of “action groups” and “pro-prisoner committees” was set up, financed with robberies carried out by “authentic” anarchists but also by the darker elements. These were also years in which killing the class enemy held a special attraction among the young, with the Russian revolution as their example, while many workers, despite having never pulled the trigger and unaware of the details of the assassinations, still felt indifference or pleasure at the death of a “big shot.” Finally, these were times when the movement began to acquire legitimacy with its martyrs. In the anarchist lists of martyrdom, “the top places were reserved for those who have used violence,” claimed Pestaña, the moderate leader of the CNT.¹⁸

These years left their mark. In the memories of many people, anarchism and terrorism were permanently linked. Forget about “kings of the working-class pistol” or “exemplary militants” who, according to García Oliver, were ready to come forward during difficult times: for them, they were common murderers. A good many other people, however, recalled those “heroic” years in which underground anarchism and action coexisted with a trade unionism that was revolutionary, disciplined, and of mass appeal, developing its class ideas in the press, in workshops and factories, and in the street. This image of effective unionism, which showed its face and won disputes against unscrupulous employers, was set to last, in spite of being outlawed by Primo de Rivera's dictatorship (1923–1930), and it resurfaced during the Republic. Once again, it was the two faces of anarchism, myth and reality, mixed in the images of its defenders and detractors.

The Devastating Violence of the Proletariat

The proclamation of the Republic on April 14, 1931 opened a good many doors to the revolutionary syndicalism that had been ruptured a few years previously by the gun law on all sides and silenced by the dictatorship. More than anything else, it enabled it to come into the public eye once more and to put into practice the spreading of ideas that had identified republicans, socialists, and anarchists since the beginning of the century. The proclamation of the Republic was none other than a “political fact,” which was to become “a revolution destined to transform all the political and economic values,” with the resources that were characteristic of the CNT: direct action and the class struggle in the streets.¹⁹

A good deal was expected of this Republic which had “sprung from the people” and which was preferable to “a monarchy by the grace of God,” voted in by a good many CNT members: much was expected, especially freedom. And the CNT, while it did not trust republican governments to modify the class structure, did at least expect a regime of freedoms that would help them to enhance the organization of their unions and successfully defend the interests of the working classes more effectively than their UGT rivals.

The initial refusal to cross swords with the republican regime was as a result of the hopes and expectations that impregnated the atmosphere in Spain as soon as the king was forced to leave the throne. Galo Díez was quite clear about this and said as much to his comrades in the CNT Conference held in Madrid two months later. They needed to talk to the people not just about their revolutionary dreams, but also “their hopes, their needs, their misfortunes, their rights.” Compared to the Dictatorship, the Republic offered much more, and so it was not advisable “to sacrifice what little advantage there was to be gained for the sake of greater disadvantages.” The majority of Spaniards, opined Galo Díez, were republicans and welcomed the Republic “like children with new shoes.” The most sensible thing was “to wait until the novelty of the republic wears off and then, once republicanism becomes a disappointment, start out on the road towards a better ideal.” When the people eventually destroyed their shoes, “and they will destroy them, to be sure,” the CNT would become the real hope for the future.²⁰

But these declarations were one thing and reality another. Between May and June, 1931, the CNT called several strikes, which resulted in quite a few deaths, and which dashed many of the hopes of the more moderate unionists, such as Joan Peiró, Angel Pestaña, or José Villaverde, and others who thought that the freedoms introduced by the Republic would help to reinforce the organization.

The incorporation of socialist and UGT members into the government barred the way to any possible understanding between the two trade union groups. The new powers granted to the UGT gave them blatantly favourable treatment, fundamentally in the control of employment, a scarce commodity at that time. The CNT saw this favouritism and launched itself into open dispute which at first was confined to warnings and threats, to be transformed later into coercion and violence. Having excluded themselves from political representation, the CNT leaders, especially those who had started to dominate the organization from early 1932, were able to fan the flame of purity, the strength of an anarchist message up against such a “perverse” social and political reality. Without political allies, and distanced from a government that was introducing reforms that affected them, the CNT unions began to mobilize their members in the streets, to criticise and oppose the State. Taking to the streets, with action taking precedence over words, became the “revolutionary act par excellence.”²¹

The CNT mobilizations soon showed that the forces of law and order were to act with the same brutality as under the monarchy. The confrontations that started as early as the summer of 1931 were to produce several deaths and a large number of arrests. Some of these early events that ended up in bloodshed were mere demonstrations and collective protests, disputes that were motivated merely by claims for better conditions, which were always answered by firearms. Once the necessary initial coexistence was broken, the republican authorities displayed a remarkable inability to distinguish between social conflicts and “acts of aggression against the Republic,” while the anarcho-syndicalists began to proclaim themselves as being victims of the “socialist-republican dictatorship.”

The most radical sector of the anarchist movement used the deaths and repression as a springboard for mobilization against the Republic, because the blood of these victims was not just any blood: it was “proletarian blood,” something which underlined the socialist betrayal even more. What was at stake was the defence of human freedom and dignity against the perversity of the structures of power; the defence of the poverty-stricken, “the starving,” against order. At first, this rhetoric belonged to scattered anarchist groups who were extremely influential in certain media, but with very little representation in the unions. When, with the passing of time (very little time, in fact), these unions found that their demands were not being met by the employers, and the employment and social policy of the republicans and socialists could not benefit the most needy either, the calls to insurrection intensified. From January 1932 onwards, the rhetoric concerning the spilling of “proletarian blood” became incorporated into the anarchist media permanently.

The first anarchist insurrection began on January 19, 1932, when miners from the San Cornelio estate in Figols (Barcelona) went on strike, having taken over the arms of the somatén. The dispute spread to other localities in the Alto Llobregat and Cardoner areas. There was no looting, no abolition of private property, no deaths. But the CNT National Committee, spurred on by the appetite for a “revolutionary strike,” as expressed by some of the union leaders in Barcelona, agreed in a meeting held on January 23 “to call a strike in the whole of Spain, this call to be accepted with all its consequences.” Only a few isolated villages in Valencia and Aragon responded. By January 27, order had been restored, with several dozen arrests and the closing down of all the CNT offices in the districts affected.

The cycle of insurrection did not stop there. On January 8, 1933, the Catalonia Regional Defence Committee provoked an armed uprising, which extended, with little success, to some villages in Valencia and Aragon. When that had been put down, the forces of law and order took over Casas Viejas, a small town in the province of Cadiz. There followed a veritable massacre. Nineteen men, two women, and a child were killed, as were three civil guards. Dozens of peasants were arrested and tortured. It was a tragic time for the Second Republic.

Eleven months later, with a right-wing government now in power, the revolutionary movement reached an unprecedented intensity, expanding through various districts of Aragon and La Rioja, and caused no little discomfort to the authorities in Zaragoza for several days. The insurrection which closed the cycle of libertarian communist bids lasted for a week. And it was this uprising in December 1933 that was the most costly of the three: seventy-five deaths and 101 wounded among the insurgents; eleven civil guards were killed and forty-five wounded; three assault guards were killed and eighteen were injured.

The common origin of all the tragic events that accompanied these insurrections was confrontation with the forces of law and order. There were no antichurch atrocities or acts of vengeance, nor did the insurgents use any violence against the employers or symbols of economic exploitation, to name just some of the targets aimed at by the anarchist movement with the revolution that was started after the coup d'état of July 1936. However, the fact that these were not targets does not make this type of coercion against established authority any easier to swallow. Behind it all was essentially a rejection of the electoral system, the parliamentary regime, and a belief that force was the only way to eliminate class privileges and their concomitant abuses of power.

It was only very small and localized groups, if comparisons are to be made with other protest actions undertaken by the CNT, that came to the fore each time this would-be revolution was supposed to begin. Those who had decided on the suitable moment for mobilization never showed the same ability to organise it, among other reasons because there was not much to organize. A strike was one thing, a dispute fuelled by bad living conditions, a breach of employment conditions, or a protest against repression; quite another thing was an armed insurrection which had nothing to do with the usual industrial action based on trade unionism, which was, after all, where the CNT's strength lay.

These insurrections were not an expression of the “devastating violence of the proletariat,” but the work of anarchists groups fired by catastrophe-based visions of a rapidly approaching destruction of capitalist society. Ill-prepared, lacking broad-based support from society, and in confrontation with a State that constantly maintained its coercion mechanisms, these visions were easily repressed.

Thus, anarcho-syndicalism maintained strained relations with the Republic and experienced various states of mind during its first three years of existence, from the initial hopes to insurrections, with the hostility of the majority of its members in the middle. The violence used in this period bore very little resemblance to the nineteenth-century “propaganda by deed” or the gun law of the 1920s. Its most extreme form, insurrection, was, as Manuel Azaña noted, “armed rebelliousness against society and the State,” albeit with few resources and fewer arms than the occasion required. It was encouraged by a notable nucleus of “journalists” and amateur writers who placed their pens at the disposal of the revolution. And it was put into practice by action groups, supporters of “gestures of heroic rebellion,” of “revolutionary gymnastics,” systematically confronting the “repressive forces.” There was the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), the activists of the majority of the CNT's builders' unions, and especially “Los Solidarios” a group known as “Nosotros” from 1933 onwards, with Francisco Ascaso, Buenaventura Durruti, and Juan García Oliver.²²

Set against them were people like Angel Pestaña, Joan Peiró, or José Villaverde, leading mentors of revolutionary syndicalism from 1918 onwards, who tried to consolidate a strong, stable organization, independent of political parties, keeping their distance from the uncontrolled activities of the action groups, and with the ever-present aim of abolishing capitalism and the State through a revolution “born of the deep feeling of the people.” The curtain that the Republic raised on freedoms and hopes, revealing a stage that was very different to that of previous trade-union restrictions, enabled them to feel strong enough to publicly opt for this strategy. But the tragic failure of a good many labor disputes made it impossible to tread this path as a mass movement, and accelerated the rise of groups and individuals who were prepared to brave the turbulent waters of confrontation with the repressive machine of law and order. Once again, the dark face of anarchism came to prevail. And anarchism and revolutionary violence were on the same side of the scales in the collective memory of almost everyone who did not consider themselves anarchists.

This was especially so as a result of subsequent events, with the military uprising in July 1936, when the collapse of the State's coercion mechanisms finally opened the gates to long-awaited revolution and Civil War. Anarcho-syndicalism suddenly found what it had been looking for in vain for so long: a historic opportunity to bring its egalitarian dream of an earthly paradise to reality. Protest trade unionism and unsuccessful uprisings were now things of the past. Wherever the military insurgents were defeated, an instinctive, violent revolutionary process occurred, aimed at destroying the positions of the privileged groups. Armed men and women filled the streets. They were not precisely there to defend the “bourgeois” Republic—it was too late for that—but to start a revolution. Politics had given way to arms.

A counter-revolutionary coup d'état to put a brake on the revolution ended up actually stimulating it. This was the not the first, nor indeed the last time that this was to occur in history. It is very likely that without the coup, and in the absence of the collapse of the State's authority, the revolution would never have come about. But once the mechanism of military rebellion and revolutionary response had been started up, armed conflict, Civil War, was the only outcome.

And armed conflict was used at the outset not for constructing (that would come later) but for eradicating “social evil” and its major causes. There were hundreds and thousands of cases of liquidation of those considered to be the oppressor in the early weeks, the final days of July and the whole of August of 1936. There was a brutal response to any rebel forces who were defeated, as they were seen as being directly responsible for the violence and blood that was being spilled in towns and villages all over Spain. There was bitter, instantaneous, swift persecution of the clergy, who were living a nightmare as the easiest target in the break up of social order. This purge was also applied to politicians, conservatives, employers, landowners, farmworkers, the middle class, shopkeepers, factory workers who were known for their moderate ideas, technicians and personnel managers in many different sectors, and Catholics; especially Catholics.

In the first few months of the war, for the radical elimination of all these examples of traditional order, the “practice of expeditious justice” was to be found in the “paseo” in order to settle scores, satisfy class hatred or wreak vengeance. The description of this method left to us by the anarchist Juan García Oliver, Minister of Justice in the Republic from November 1936 to May 1937, is quite clear: “as the military uprising meant the rupture of all social checks, because it was carried out by classes who traditionally maintained social order, the attempts to reestablish legal balance caused the spirit of justice to revert to its most distant and purest origin: the people: vox populi, suprema lex. And the people, while the abnormal situation lasted, created and applied its law and procedure, the ‘paseo.'”²³

Assaults on prisons, “paseos,” and “sacas” (mass executions) were therefore the manifestations of terror unleashed by the revolutionary storm in the summer of 1936 in the name of the people. While the summer heat lasted, just as with the other “heated” terror wrought by the military, “señoritos,” and landowners, judicial procedures were not considered necessary. The “paseo” was much faster.

Not everyone was keen to spill blood and from the outset, a great many voices were raised against the killings, albeit very few from the military and catholic crusaders of the other side. However, the defeat of the uprising broke moorings, brought about complete liberation from the yokes of the past, gave birth to the long-awaited revolution and announced the hour of final justice for the bosses, the rich and exploiters, a favorite theme of the most radical propaganda and rhetoric. With no rules, no government, no mechanisms of coercion to force people to comply with the law, the “thirst for justice,” vengeance and class hatreds spread like a devastating force to annihilate the old order.

This “heated” terror cooled down from the end of November 1936, and until the first quarter of 1939, with the new outbreak of violence wrought by the troops withdrawing from Catalonia and Levante, it had cooled down so much that there were a good many places where the killing had stopped altogether. This was not because there was no-one to kill, as some people have maintained: the same “crimes,” the same “reasons” that in July and August 1936 were used to send a good many to the grave were given a different treatment by the popular tribunals in 1937 and 1938. Thousands of prisoners escaped death as a result of the order and discipline imposed behind the scenes by political organizations with representation in the governments of Francisco Largo Caballero and Juan Negrín, such as the UGT, the CNT, as well as communists, republicans, and Basque and Catalan nationalists.

Immersed in the revolution, war and the persecution of their opponents, the anarcho-syndicalists were to live their golden age, albeit short-lived. They spread a complex network of revolutionary committees all over Republican Spain. They collectivised land and factories. They created militias. They took part in the governments of Catalonia and the Republic. And until the revolution became stagnant, they dreamed of a world without class, or political parties, or states. Those who survived the harsh repression after the defeat went to their graves remembering a revolution that was of the people, that saw collectivization, that had no masters or authority, a revolution that was unique in the history of humanity. Dozens of accounts, documentaries, books, novels, and films have kept the flame burning, in spite of the efforts of the detractors on the republican and Francoist sides, who from the beginning accused the CNT-FAI of every crime imaginable. Furthermore, as this story ended in tragedy, interpretations of the events do not tend to pull punches. And for the last time, the two faces of anarchism were to come to light, because of what it did, and what others said it did.

Imprisonment, Executions, Exile

The Civil War and the revolution left lasting scars on Spanish society. After Franco's conquest of all the territory that had been faithful to the Republic, in April of 1939, social order was restored with the same swiftness that it had been overthrown.

Imprisonment, executions and exile drove anarcho-syndicalism into a tunnel from which it was never to reemerge. Its militants went underground, provoked various guerrilla skirmishes and showed their faces in several conflicts. Clandestinity was nothing new in the history of Spanish anarchism. Neither were repression, arrests, tortures, executions, or outlawing. Indeed, clandestinity and repression had gone hand in hand since the phantom Cantonal in 1873, in the 1890s, the early years of the twentieth century, and during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, all stages of regression in the mobilisation and organisation of the workers, which is precisely when violence, “propaganda by deed” and terrorism flourished.

But the period of clandestinity that began in 1939 was completely different to previous periods. It was the result of a defeat in a war, mercilessly imposed. Conditions for trade unionism to function just did not exist; and there was no basic framework of freedoms that had, in previous times, even the harshest, enabled trade union doctrine and culture to be available to the people. Under the conditions that had been imposed by the end of the war, it was extremely difficult to put the people first, speculate on future society or dream utopian dreams. That was now history, albeit recent history; the opportunity had been lost, destroyed by the war and communist rivals, annihilated by the Francoist arms. Now there was just silence at home and bitter controversies, confrontations, divisions and splits among the members in exile. It was all that most of them could do to survive, to find somewhere far away to settle.²⁴

Up to the end of the Second World War, there were hopes. They carried out an assassination attempt on Franco in 1940, they blew up power stations, and carried out acts of sabotage. Many anarchists joined the French Resistance against Nazism, thinking that it was still their war, a war to get rid of all tyrants, Franco being the biggest, and that this would enable them to return to their homes, their jobs, and their land. But Hitler and Mussolini were dead, the Axis powers were defeated, and Franco was still there. And he still remembered the war and dealt out harsh punishment to those who had been defeated.²⁵

Those who rebuilt the CNT “at home” were unknown. All the famous leaders were in exile, except for those that the war and repression had accounted for, and there were a good deal of those, such as Francisco Ascaso, Durruti, José Villaverde, or Joan Peiró. Anarcho-syndicalism never got off the ground again, in spite of its participation in the maquis and urban guerrilla groups, desperate acts of resistance. The war and the cruel dictatorship had destroyed the movement. The changes that were brought about from the 1950s onwards, with modernisation and development, were to prevent it from taking root again.

Eighty years. That is how long the Spanish anarchist movement lasted. It was not just a Spanish phenomenon, but in the end, anarchism came to be identified with Spain as one of the many singular elements in its contemporary history. It took firm root in places as diverse as industrial Catalonia and rural Andalusia, at a time when it had disappeared in the rest of Western Europe. It would go and come back again, with its outbursts of protest, its social project for freedom, the collectivization of production resources, the abolition of the State, the organization of a future society free from coercion. And it was always accompanied by violence, from magnicide or the bombs that always claimed “innocent victims,” to the revolutionary terror of the summer of 1936. Its history is as solemn, as complex, and as contradictory as that.