Two prejudices
anarchists, perhaps unconsciously seeing the hopelessness of their position, have made a point of rejecting logic and reason entirely. They stress spontaneity, emotions, instincts, rather than allegedly cold and inhuman logic. By so doing, they can of course remain blind to the irrationality of their position. . . Irrationality indeed permeates almost all the views of the left-wing anarchists.
Murray N. RothbardFootnote 1
This author defines himself as an anarchist but is an anarchist of a very special type. He obviously does not identify himself with the left-wing anarchism which he so virulently criticises. His name is Murray Rothbard (1926–95). He is an American economist, a member of the so-called Austrian School and also the chief representative of the school of thought which he himself baptised ‘anarcho-capitalism’, also known as free-market anarchism and right-wing anarchism. However, the proposals of Rothbard and his followers have little or nothing to do with the problems, targets and goals, forms of action and historical development of the tradition of social and political thought that emerged in the 1860s as an organised political force and which is normally known as anarchism, anarchism without adjectives, at least in relation to social movements.Footnote 2 A specific development of this tradition, the Spanish anarchist movement under Franco's dictatorship (1939–75), will be the subject of this article.
The quote from Rothbard contains two prejudices that this article seeks to dismantle. The first of these is the association of anarchism with irrationality. This is a prejudice shared by many observers and not just by Rothbard. The work of historians like Juan Díaz del Moral, Gerald Brenan and Eric Hobsbawm seems to have played a considerable part in the diffusion of this idea as they understood anarchism, and Spanish anarchism more specifically, in terms of a modern version of millenarianism.Footnote 3 Davide Turcato has recently pointed out that this stereotype and the attempts of many analysts to dismantle it on the basis of the examination of the more cultural and less political aspects of anarchism are in fact two sides of the same irrationalist coin which erroneously links effectiveness with rationality. ‘The anarchists’ failure to carry through a successful revolution tends to be taken as evidence against their rationality’, Turcato notes.Footnote 4 According to Turcato, this distortion has been encouraged by the almost permanent clandestine context in which the international anarchist movement has operated. This has caused enormous difficulties for the study of the mode of operation of anarchist direct action and insurrectionary tactics. Those historians who work on anarchism have in general to work with very fragmented and dispersed sources. However, it is a mistake to confuse opacity with irrationality.
The second prejudice opposes rationality and emotion, in this case within anarchism, to emphasise how emotions predominate among anarchists, along with instinct and spontaneity, and against logic and reason. This emotion versus rationality opposition was common in the early analyses of social movements. Authors such as Gustave Le Bon, William Kornhauser and Neil Smelser understood social movements as fundamentally irrational phenomena, and activists as psychologically unstable and emotionally overwrought individuals. In fact the development of the study of social movements can in large measure be explained in terms of a continuum of action and reaction around this issue. After a period of intense international mobilisations, from the 1970s onwards many scholars have dedicated themselves to attacking the idea that social movements are irrational by emphasising their more strategic aspects. However, this has had the perverse effect of banishing the emotions from the analysis of contentious politics.Footnote 5 Towards the end of the 1990s and at the start of the 2000s, scholars such as Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper and Francesca Polletta made a course correction in this field of study with their ‘emotional turn’ which ‘offer[s] a multifaceted picture of human beingness that, without denying the reasoning capabilities of movement actors, posits emotion as a ubiquitous and vital feature of social life.’Footnote 6 This article follows in the footsteps of this latter contribution, seeking to advance the emerging subfield of emotions and social movements on the basis of a longitudinal study of the emotional practices of the anarchist movement during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
The study of Spanish anarchism during the post-war period: problems and questions
The birth of Spanish anarchism is usually marked with Giuseppe Fanelli's visit to Madrid as a delegate of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy (Alianza Internacional de la Democracia Socialista) in November 1868, and the later creation, under his influence, of the Spanish regional federation (Federación Regional Española), that is to say, the Spanish branch of the International Workers’ Association (Asociación Internacional de Trabajadores).Footnote 7 The Federación, and the organisations with various names that later replaced it, gave expression to a strong libertarian-inspired workers’ movement which, after the overcoming of various splits and problems, saw the foundation of the national labour confederation (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, CNT) in 1910 in the city of Barcelona, a united and co-ordinated resistance front against capitalism. While the organisation could at times operate legally, it was more often forced to operate underground. It constituted the visible head of a broader libertarian movement made up of a network of societies, groups and clubs.
The Spanish Civil War (17 July 1936–1 April 1939) represented the apogee of the anarchist movement, whose activists controlled different cities and regions after having defeated the military uprising that sparked the war. In regions such as Catalonia, eastern Aragon, and Valencia, anarchists promoted industrial and agrarian collectives. However, early problems arose in the making of revolution during wartime. Anarchist leaders joined the Catalonian government on 26 September 1936, and the Republican one a week later. The famous May Days of 1937 signalled the distance between the leaders and the union rank-and-file, who accused them of giving in. After this ‘civil war within the Civil War’,Footnote 8 state troops dismantled revolutionary collectivisation as well as the local and regional organs of workers’ power.Footnote 9
For several decades, political scientists, sociologists and historians, both foreign and local, have claimed that a decline to extinction followed this high point of the anarchist movement in Spain.Footnote 10 The end of the Spanish Civil War saw the beginning of the Francoist dictatorship (1939–75), which mercilessly persecuted its enemies, among them the anarchists, and destroyed their organisations. The general conclusion has been that the CNTists collapsed (‘cenetistas se extinguieron’).Footnote 11 This happened both because of the brutal repression but also because of internal conflicts and a failure to adapt to the new context. In the view of some, the collapse of the anarchist movement began during the civil war itself with the progressive advance of the Francoist forces and the internal repression suffered by the anarchists at the hands of some of their comrades-in-arms, starting from May 1937 in particular.
There is no doubt that the repression launched by the Francoist regime had devastating effects on the anarchist movement. The political responsibilities law (Ley de Responsabilidades Políticas) passed in February 1939 banned the CNT and other anarchist organisations, among them the Iberian anarchist federation (Federación Anarquista Ibérica, FAI), created in 1927. Their members were persecuted and suffered reprisals, not only for clandestinely reconstructing their organisations, but also for having belonged to them in the past. Nevertheless, first the accounts of the protagonists and later the work of some researchers have started to produce a revision of the story of the extinction of the movement with a more nuanced and complex interpretation of what occurred.Footnote 12 These accounts and studies have revealed the reactivation of the anarchist networks, especially during two periods, the middle of the 1940s, and first half of the 1960s.
How should this reactivation be understood? Anarchist activism was a high-risk activism because of the potentially dramatic consequences it entailed, including persecution, torture, imprisonment and even death. According to the classic model of political opportunities,Footnote 13 the Francoist dictatorship offered a significantly closed structure for mobilisation. It was an anti-democratic, heavily centralised regime in which the agents of the state exercised a high degree of control over ordinary citizens’ lives, activities and resources, and under which political opponents suffered fierce repression.Footnote 14 However, as has been pointed out by several authors, activists do not always automatically interpret their opportunities on the basis of objective changes. Rather, they perceive them through a process of attribution of meaning involving cultural parameters like emotions, ideology, national character, public discourse and the media.Footnote 15 This is particularly notable in the case of high-risk activism. Its arrival on the scene and continuity over time cannot be explained without making reference to the role of strong subjective, affective and emotional elements.Footnote 16
The few studies devoted to anarchist activism under Franco's dictatorship show a predominant interest in formal organisations and ideological disputes within it.Footnote 17 This article focuses instead on the process of mobilisation and the affective elements supporting this process. What emotions were mobilised? On the basis of what events – and what interpretation of them – was the mobilisation of these emotions sustained? What impact did social and political changes have on the emotional languages of the anarchists? To what degree was the use of emotions successful in recruiting activists for the struggle against Franco? These are some of the questions which will guide the analysis of the emotions in this context. The sources used include the underground press, the memoirs of activists and various archive materials.
The hope of the post-war anarchists
The post-war activity of Spanish anarchists centred on the underground CNT, whose national committees controlled the dispersed fragments of the rest of the organisations known as the Spanish libertarian movement (Movimiento Libertario Español, MLE).Footnote 18 In practice, this activity was limited to the publication of the underground press, the holding of internal meetings (local, regional and national) and contacts with other oppositional anti-Francoist forces.Footnote 19 All these activities were carried out, quite obviously, on a covert basis and any imprudent act could lead to repression from the security forces of the regime.Footnote 20 1945–47 was the time of the greatest level of activity in the post-war period.Footnote 21 In the harsh conditions imposed by the Franco dictatorship, the anarchists were mobilised in a micro-environment of optimism motivated in principle by the interpretation of certain events outside the domestic context of mobilisation, in particular the Second World War. Its beginning had emotional repercussions for anarchists. The declaration of war by Great Britain and France on Germany in September 1939 was received as ‘great news’ that triggered ‘hopes’.Footnote 22 Just four months after the end of the Spanish Civil War, the nations that had supported a non-intervention policy in it joined the fight against fascism.
The war's turn in favour of the Allies in 1943 and especially the proximity of its end increased the perception of the vulnerability of the Francoist regime. Anarchists understood the outcome of the war to mean that the days of Franco's regime were numbered. The articles published in the movement's main periodicals in the summer of 1945 thus emphasised ‘the new era opening up for Spain and the world’ and the ‘short time’ they believed was left for the dictatorship in Spain.Footnote 23 The same feeling is remembered by people who were in exile at the time: ‘All the Spanish refugees without exception felt a lot of hope. They believed, and for good reasons, that their country would be liberated from the Francoist dictatorship which had been put in power with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini.’Footnote 24 Spain's liberation was regarded as a ‘moral duty’ borne by the Allies, as many exiled Spanish anarchists had fought fascism in Europe alongside other anti-Franco Spaniards, both at the front and in the rearguard.Footnote 25
In September 1945, after the surrender of Japan, the CNT distributed leaflets which claimed that the moment of liberation was coming for Spain with the ‘final and victorious attack against Franco and the Falange.’Footnote 26 This feeling of optimism endured in spite of the fact that aid from the Allies did not arrive. This is how that moment was recalled by Olegario Pachón, an exiled activist, who, thinking back to February 1946, wrote,
at that time there was still the hope that the Allies would help us to overthrow Franco and when there are hopes like that people take whatever risks may be necessary because they believe that their sacrifice will be recompensed by seeing the fruits of their activities.Footnote 27
The use of hope in the anarchists’ discourse allowed them to positively evaluate the effectiveness of their challenge to the authorities. Hope can be seen as an optimistic emotional environment that brings about a sense of the efficacy of collective action. It is a mood which, like anxiety, depression and melancholy, is generated in a specific context but which can affect what we think and do in other contexts.Footnote 28 Hope is generated, for example, when members of a social movement perceive the vulnerability of their opponent and after subsequent ‘cognitive liberation’ accelerate their mobilisation.Footnote 29 This dynamic is observed particularly in high-risk activism, where hope can serve as a special incentive for collective action.Footnote 30
In this respect, emotional discourse lowered the costs of activism and helped form a favourable interpretation of the political opportunities for mobilisation. As mentioned above, the dynamic and interactive perspective on the political opportunity structure argues that this is constructed in a symbolic struggle between and within social movements. In this sense, the Franco regime was a significantly closed political environment where, however, in the light of findings in clandestine publications and in the testimonies of the protagonists, hope played an important role in the attribution of opportunities for the mobilisation of the anarchists. The mobilisation of hope by the clandestine press contributed to the assumption of greater risks along the lines described by Olegario Pachón. Thus, following Monique Scheer, we may understand the mobilisation of emotions as an emotional practice, that is a manipulation of the body and mind which, in this case, evoked hope in a context of fear and indeed sought to substitute the former for the latter.Footnote 31 This emotional practice was supported fundamentally by the clandestine press.
However, the hope vested in receiving Allied help against Franco finally faded, especially after the publication of the tripartite note in March 1946. In it, the United States, France and the UK called for a peaceful solution to the ‘Spanish problem’, a solution that was to be exclusively the work of the Spanish themselves. However, for months, the circular letters and clandestine press continued to preach ‘the proximity of the return of civil liberties’: ‘Everything points to the prompt fall of the pompous caudillo who has never stooped so low as in the shameful concessions he is making to foreigners to save his regime at the cost of the Spanish people. . . we will soon be free of his yoke.’Footnote 32 The attitude of the activists was no longer based on ‘a passive mentality originating in the hope for a solution to our problems that would come from abroad’, but rather on the visibility of the movement itself.Footnote 33 The contacts the national alliance of democratic forces (Alianza Nacional de Fuerzas Democráticas, ANFD) had forged with monarchists helped create ‘a climate of optimism. . . with regard to political change’. Along similar lines, the Secretary General of the CNT pronounced in January 1947 that he was ‘frankly optimistic about the signing of the pact between all anti-Francoist sectors and its prospects for quick and effective results.’Footnote 34 The underground press explained ‘the well-founded basis for our optimism’, reasoning that
We are not desperate and we do not lose confidence in our possibilities, which are today greater than ever. Whatever the UN General Assembly decides we can affirm that the days of fascism and Franco are numbered. Nobody can change, in exchange for the food robbed from the Spanish people, the plans of forces which have become fully conscious of their possibilities.Footnote 35
As a result of all this, the anarchist organisations in exile drew up lists of activists willing to quickly return to Spain, and at the same time they asked their members to keep up with the payment of their membership fees in order for them to be better able to manage their activities inside Spain itself.Footnote 36 In their clandestine meetings, the anarchists in Spain called for the organisation of active militants so that they ‘would not be overwhelmed by events’, events which they thought would soon occur.Footnote 37 However, the dialogue with the monarchists ran into the ground in 1947. After that, the ANFD gave its member organisations authority to hold discussions on an individual basis, which led to the final collapse of the alliance. This, along with other factors, among them government repression, put an end to the most promising anti-Francoist initiative.
Representing indignation
The interpretation of certain events and processes generated a mood among Spanish anarchists, which we have here identified as hope. In turn, this positive mood mediated the interpretation of means and ends, favouring the development of collective action.Footnote 38 However, it seems reasonable to consider that the hope of foreign aid and the enthusiasm about participating in a common opposition front were not enough to overcome the fear of the consequences that the anarchists’ mobilisation could entail. At the same time, it must be pointed out that research into emotions and social movements indicates that emotions do not appear on their own but rather in combination with other emotions, and that these emotions, and combinations and interactions of emotions, are crucial to action.Footnote 39
Among the other emotions mobilised by the Spanish, the visibility of indignation in the movement's clandestine press is particularly noteworthy. In general terms, indignation can be conceived as an emotion that entails moral judgment about a person or group of persons, who are accused of being responsible for a situation that is seen as unfair or wretched in some respect. Indignation results from the belief that a norm has been violated in an arbitrary and deliberate way, and that this action causes damage or suffering. It implies a rupture of a moral expectation as damage is inflicted on someone who does not deserve it and that this infliction of damage should not have been allowed to happen. The resulting indignation brings with it a sense of obligation to repair the situation. This force can be mobilised against those responsible for the situation that generates the sense of indignation, transforming them into the political objective of collective action.Footnote 40
It might seem that social movements would have to do very little to incite indignation in the context of dictatorships, as individuals might be thought to experience it naturally when faced with multiple abuses of power. However, an analysis of clandestine anarchist publications tells a rather different story. As Scheer suggests, on many occasions conceptual knowledge of an injustice is not sufficient on its own to cause feelings of disgust and anger, or if it is, then only weakly.Footnote 41 The details of the foul behaviour of the Francoist regime published in the clandestine press helped transform, as the following examples will show, the conceptual knowledge of the regime's illegitimacy into bodily knowledge, by creating a feeling of indignation. Thus, mobilisation of indignation was an emotional practice. The movements’ leaders made considerable efforts to mobilise moral indignation in their discourses and they did so in a dramatic fashion, communicating their interpretation of the political and social reality of Spain in a manner which sought to maximise the impact on the audience.Footnote 42
In 1945 the anti-Francoist opposition sought international help to put an end to what the Atlantic Charter and the Crimea Conference had described as the ‘Axis satellite state’ in Spain and replace it with an interim and representative government which would respond to the will of the people. Anarchist clandestine newspapers emphasised the illegitimacy of the regime and portrayed it as brutal and tyrannical, a ‘regime of shame and humiliation’ in a country ‘sadistically and constantly tormented by the misdeeds of the tyrant’ with the help of a ‘certain caste of Spaniards: the military, religious orders, government ministries and capitalism in general’ that enjoyed all kinds of privileges while ‘the children of the working class are dying of hunger’ and a ‘permanent threat hangs over the citizen’ because ‘the lives of all Spanish people depend on the discretion of the armed violence of the murderers in the Falange, a violence beyond the reach of the law.’Footnote 43
In this way, anarchists staged a strategic dramaturgy before an internal audience (the Spanish people) and an external one as well (the Allied powers) with the intention of reproducing in these ‘spectators’ the indignation which they themselves felt and thus obtaining support, recruiting activists and accumulating resources.Footnote 44 On this stage, the opposition played the role of the legitimate alternative to the illegitimate regime. In principle the legitimacy of the opposition was founded on that of the Republic that had been swept away by Franco's rebellion, assisted by ‘the barefaced intervention of some [Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy] along with the tolerant passivity of others [the democracies that later became the Allies]’.Footnote 45 The anarchists’ initial demand was a return to the 1931 Constitution and with it the restoration of ‘the most basic civil liberties’.Footnote 46 They sought to do this not through ‘sporadic actions and useless sacrifices’ but rather by carrying out ‘decisive acts’ within the political and diplomatic path represented by the anti-Franco alliance formed by the ‘Spanish democratic classes’.Footnote 47 After the tripartite note in March 1946, this alliance accepted ‘the collaboration of those monarchists and conservatives who loyally wish to substitute the current regime for a different one that would proclaim, recognise and respect the rights of the individual’.Footnote 48
Hope and indignation as a moral battery
Analysis of clandestine publications and other kinds of sources shows that the main emotions mobilised by the anarchists in their discourse were hope and indignation. These two emotions functioned as a ‘moral battery’, a concept James Jasper proposed in order to understand a particular form of combination between ‘a positive and a negative emotion, and the tension or contrast between them [that] motivates action or demands attention. An emotion can be strengthened when we explicitly or implicitly compare it to its opposite, just as a battery works through the tension between its positive and negative poles.’Footnote 49
The opposite pole of hope for future change is normally fear, anxiety and other suffering in the present, but it is also sometimes combined with other emotions.Footnote 50 In the case of the anarchist movement during the Francoist dictatorship, this contrast seems to have been conducted mainly through indignation. At the same time, the combination of indignation and hope, and the relative importance of both with respect to other emotions in anarchist discourse do not appear to be fortuitous. As Jasper has pointed out, emotional pairings like this are normally intentional and strategic.Footnote 51 The rhetorical work carried out by the leaders of the movement sought to construct sensitivities which could draw people into participation.Footnote 52 Hope and indignation can be seen as energising emotions, the combination of which facilitated the taking on of risks.
The organisers of social movements use this combination to exaggerate the promise of the future while stressing the suffering of the present.Footnote 53 To demand dignity is to assert agency. The ability to feel and display indignation – an emotion associated with political agency – represents a kind of ‘emotional liberation’ which usually accompanies the ‘cognitive liberation’ facilitated by the sense of the efficacy of collective action.Footnote 54 According to Debra King, this liberation involves an emotional transformation on the part of the individual and the construction of new emotional links.Footnote 55 In the case of the Spanish anarchists, this change could help to understand the development of previously unthinkable initiatives like the establishment of alliances with very different political forces, for example, monarchists and rightist Republicans. In fact, a large percentage of anarchists in exile, who did not experience the sufferings of those inside Spain – the exiles did suffer but for different reasons – did not understand this change and criticised it.Footnote 56
A negative reciprocal emotion: resentment
Up to now we have looked at emotions that helps us to understand the continued mobilisation of the anarchist movement against Francoism. However, other emotions played their role in the movement too. Among those worth highlighting is resentment, in this case not directed at external enemies but rather against one's own comrades. Understood in this sense, resentment was a reciprocal emotion, which concerned participants’ ongoing feelings toward each other. According to Jasper it is impossible to understand the continuity of social movements without this type of emotion.Footnote 57 However, the literature normally refers to positive reciprocal emotions such as friendship, love, solidarity and loyalty, and less frequently to others such as betrayal, non-recognition, resentment and mistrust, which are extremely difficult to navigate and which, in the last analysis, can put an end to a movement.Footnote 58
In 1945 the Spanish anarchist movement in exile split into two parts, which had important consequences for activism inside the country in terms of logistical and material support, but also at the emotional level. The conflict turned on tactical questions – moderates versus radicals – but also on others such as ‘resentments, ambitions, responsibilities and mental routines’.Footnote 59 Those who opposed the establishment of political alliances with other opposition groups and participation in Republican institutions outside Spain came to dominate the organisations in exile while the clandestine movement in Spain maintained these alliances and participation. However, in neither case was adherence to these positions unanimous. On both sides of the border dissident groups were formed which defied the predominant line on tactics.
From then on, those who maintained opposing views were symbolically constructed as enemies in the internal media of the movement. Activists were divided into ‘friends’ who supported the same tactical position and ‘the others’, the ‘so-called comrades’ and ‘external elements’.Footnote 60 The conflict was exhausting but at the same time served as an escape valve for rancour accumulated during the civil war and in earlier periods. Having said this, these personal attacks seem to been carried by a minority while a large part of the movement's base witnessed how leaders who previously had been regarded as examples of activist virtue had become bogged down in mutual expulsions and passionate infighting.
The anarchists’ emotional language twenty years later
After the crisis of the ANFD in 1947 and the harsh repression of the so-called ‘three years of terror’ (‘trienio del terror’), 1947–49, Spanish anarchists found themselves profoundly dispersed and disorganised.Footnote 61 Many were detained and received long prison sentences. When they were released from prison, some went into exile while others decided to focus on their families and their work, leaving behind their participation in clandestine mobilisation. Only after ‘the long night of the 1950s’,Footnote 62 did some old anarchists manage to once more achieve a certain level of mobilisation in the middle of the following decade. They did so by going back to an old form of organisation, affinity groups. At first small groups of friends and acquaintances gathered together. The closed-off nature of these groups offered better protection against police infiltration. Eventually some came to use the initials of the CNT, but in fact they continued to function as interconnected groups.Footnote 63
The re-mobilisation of the anarchists occurred in a context of increasing social protest. These conflicts had a fairly significant impact on what until then had been the closed institutional structure of the Francoist regime. After the student protests of 1956, the ministry of labour conceded some salary increases and allowed negotiations between workers and businessmen. Furthermore, the 1958 collective bargaining law (Ley de Convenios Colectivos) broadened the range of negotiations on working conditions. After the mining strikes of 1962, the Francoist regime changed the law in order to recognise the distinction between labour and political conflicts, and allowed the workers in the Sindicato Vertical (the only legal trade union, which was under the control of the government) a certain degree of autonomy. Finally, the calling of trade union elections in 1966 allowed opponents of the regime the possibility of entering the official bodies charged with representing workers. These institutional initiatives led to the ‘cognitive liberation’ of a new generation of opponents of the regime and the creation of new mobilisation spaces within the world of work.Footnote 64
Among anarchists, the strikes in the Asturias region in 1962 produced ‘new hope’ which pushed aside ‘a negative feeling connected to the uselessness of their efforts’, a feeling which had become widespread among activists over previous years. The perception of the vulnerability of the regime generated a feeling of optimism which pushed activists towards action to take advantage of the new opportunities, though with certain reservations:
It would be foolish to believe that the system of oppression was so weakened in its structures that we should imagine that it would be so generous as to provide a solution itself. We must persevere. It is necessary to find viable forms by way of which ever greater numbers of opponents of the regime can become involved in the struggle for freedom.Footnote 65
The success of the 1962 and later mobilisations demonstrated to anarchists the vulnerability of the regime. Anarchists saw the regime's responses as ‘marked improvements’ and ‘evident signs of evolution’.Footnote 66 They saw the moment they were living in as ‘a historic situation’, ‘the threshold of a new horizon’ in which ‘the Francoist regime [was] on the point of collapse’ due to the inefficiency of its structures and the energy of its young opponents.Footnote 67 On this occasion, the optimism expressed by anarchists resident in Spain reached such a level that some of their colleagues in exile came to describe it as ‘very excessive’.Footnote 68
The letters, internal communications and articles in the anarchist press attest once more to the importance of the mobilisation of hope among the anarchists, in this case, fed by the interpretation of the regime's reaction to a series of internal conflicts rather than by the interpetation of the possible consequences of an external event. And again, the positive pole of hope found a significant counterpoint in the negative emotion of indignation. At that time the Francoist elites were making efforts to substitute what was, according to the regime's official discourse, its original legitimacy arising from the victory of the Civil War, for a new legitimacy based on successful administration.Footnote 69 In this process these elites used material welfare as a legitimating instrument, sometimes identified as a policy of ‘development’, though this distorted concepts from the liberal and democratic vocabulary (democracy, freedoms, constitution, the rule of law, etc.) in a discourse that sought acceptance from foreign governments and public opinion both home and abroad.Footnote 70 This initiative was denounced as a farce not only by the opposition, and within the opposition by the anarchists, but also by international organisations such as the International Commission of Jurists which in 1962 published ‘The Rule of Law in Spain’, a hammer blow to the regime's aspirations to achieve Spain's entry into the European Economic Community, which had been requested in February of that year.
On this occasion anarchists sought to mobilise indignation against the regime by seeking the interest of a domestic audience, namely disaffected young people. The anarchists defended democracy, peace and economic welfare against their appropriation by the Francoist regime. They showed willingness to reach agreements ‘with all democratic opposition forces’.Footnote 71 They also sought to get over the legacy of the Civil War, which was ever more frequently seen as a collective tragedy.Footnote 72 Their initiatives sought to make Spain not only a country where it would not be possible ‘for a single man to be a slave’, as they had declared in 1932, but also a place where ‘neither want nor hunger’ would exist ‘in a context of the most insolent abundance and the most scandalous luxury’.Footnote 73 The bases of this transformation were to be the municipality and the trade union, traditional centres of revolutionary anarchist activity now reclaimed as sources of true democracy, unlike the perversion of it which was the Francoist ‘organic democracy’.Footnote 74
The strategic representation of a legitimate alternative to an illegitimate regime appeared one more time, in this case oriented to the construction of trade union and not political alliances. With these initiatives, anarchist activism reached a certain level of mobilisation after years of organisational retreat.Footnote 75 Two nuclei of affinity each created trade union alliances with other dissident groups from distinct ideological traditions: one with dissident ugetistas (members of the trade union, Unión General de Trabajadores) in the so-called Workers Union Alliance (Alianza Sindical Obrera), which was based in Barcelona, and another with dissident Falangists with whom they shared encouraging viewpoints (coincidencias alentadoras) in the initiative known as fivepointism (cincopuntismo), which was based in Madrid.Footnote 76 The latter aimed to transform the official trade union into an autonomous, independent and eventually anti-Francoist force. To do so, activists strove to reformulate anarcho-syndicalism into a kind of ‘humanistic syndicalism’, attempting to attract a new generation of workers.Footnote 77
In addition to the interaction established between hope and indignation, there is another interesting combination of emotions to be found in the anarchist discourse of the 1960s, that is, between anxiety and fascination. Anarchists saw that a new generation of dissidents, who were to a large degree distant from the traditions of the Spanish labour movement, played the most important role in mobilisations of this period.Footnote 78 Anarchists shared a feeling that if they failed to take quick action, the ‘generational ideological rupture’ would place anarchism ‘in grave danger of extinction’.Footnote 79 Thus old, clandestine publications reappeared and new ones were created that called for the reorganisation of militants.Footnote 80 Anarchists considered it a necessity to engage with the new dissidents in order to attract them to their ranks, to ‘orient, educate and immediately bring together the new cadres of workers’ leaders that have sprung from generations that have arrived in the world of work during these 25 years of harsh exploitation.’Footnote 81 At the same time, the anxiety about a failure to board the opposition train was combined with a fascination felt by anarchists at the successes achieved by the communists, the group who were to a large extent driving this train with ‘pragmatism. . . [and] manoeuvring capability in the service of carefully studied objectives’.Footnote 82 The Communist Party exercised a large degree of control over the nascent Comisiones Obreras trade unions. Anarchists saw how the communists were cutting the ground from under them in the trade unions, a field they had traditionally dominated. As a result they decided that this new challenge had to be urgently faced.Footnote 83 Indeed some anarchists, specifically those involved in the alliance with the Falangists, copied the communist tactic of infiltration into the official trade union movement.
Conclusions
During the Francoist dictatorship, the leaders of the Spanish anarchist movement tried to induce and generate certain emotions among potential supporters of the movement, most notably hope and indignation. Under the harsh conditions imposed by state repression, mobilisation of hope in anarchist discourse enabled activists to positively evaluate the effectiveness of their challenge to the authorities. In this respect, the emotional discourse lowered the costs of activism and helped form a positive interpretation of the political opportunities for mobilisation. Furthermore, the leaders of the underground movement participated in a strategic dramaturgy in front of domestic and international audiences with the intention of reproducing moral indignation in these onlookers and thus gathering support and resources for their challenge to the regime.
The contrast between hope and indignation served to charge a moral battery that helps us understand the continuity of the movement over time. This battery was charged particularly during two periods: the middle of the 1940s, coinciding with the end of the Second World War, and the early 1960s when the regime showed signs of weakness when confronted by a newly organised generation of dissidents. This was not the only moral battery, however. In the latter period another emotional combination contributed to the reactivation of some anarchist networks after many years of dispersion and scant visibility. In this case the battery was formed by the anxiety felt by anarchists when faced by their possible loss of influence at the heart of the anti-Franco opposition and the fascination they felt with the communists’ tactic of infiltration into Francoist institutions.
Emotions were crucial in the strategic framing of the anarchist movement. Both the frames and the emotions are symbolic elements in collective action, but they have been separated from each other in the literature for a long time.Footnote 84 Emotions and strategic frames merge together into what Scheer calls ‘emotional practice’, specifically that of mobilisation in relation to political activism. Social movement scholars use the term ‘emotion work’ instead. Both categories emphasise the role of activists in the production of symbols and rhetoric aimed at generating different types of emotions among potential followers.Footnote 85 The movement leaders often strive to change the degree or quality of an emotion or feeling among participants in order to inspire action.
The repeated presence of hope, indignation and other emotions in anarchist discourse is evidence of the intense emotional work of the leaders of the movement, who combined them with strategic intentions. It does not, however, tell us to what extent the efforts made to change the emotional state of potential followers were a success.Footnote 86 An in-depth analysis of the results of these efforts would require the use of other kinds of sources, closer to the rank and file. Nevertheless, it is possible to propose some initial ideas. In relative terms, the periods of the greatest mobilisation of the anarchists during the Francoist dictatorship coincided with the periods of the most intense emotional work. However, in general terms, when compared with the overall range of anti-Francoist opposition, the mobilisation of the anarchists was to some extent limited. Emotion work contributed to the recruitment of activists to the clandestine movement but that recruitment was not massive in nature. To the effects of repression, which were very harsh and highly visible, especially in the immediate post-war period, should be added the effects of infighting and factionalism, which converted what previously had been feelings of loyalty and solidarity into resentment and lack of trust towards the movement's leaders.
To what degree did the emotional language of the anarchists remain stable in Franco's Spain? To what degree did it change? This article has demonstrated the centrality of the hope-indignation combination over time. This combination maintained itself in spite of being initially motivated by the interpretation of different processes, international in the 1940s and domestic in the 1960s. The longitudinal analysis of the emotional discourse of the anarchist movement also shows the appearance of new combinations related to the internal dynamics of the movement itself and its location within the broader opposition to the regime. With the passing of the years the emotional vocabulary of the movement was enriched though its grammar remained largely the same: the central combination was maintained and new emotions were added to it. This continuity shows the importance of mobilising indignation and not only hope, in spite of the fact that the former emotion is supposedly experienced on a daily basis in the context of constant abuses of power. The anarchist movement invested considerable energy in mobilising it also in these contexts. Even in dictatorial contexts activists cannot take the existence of outrage for granted.
The analysis of the emotional discourse of the anarchist movement suggests an image of anarchists which is very different from the caricature drawn by Rothbard in the quote that served as an introduction to this article. The tactics of the anarchist movement during the Francoist dictatorship had little to do with those used in the past (and defended by the main anarchist organisations in exile). Direct action and insurrectionary tactics were replaced by the creation of and participation in alliances (first political, later trade unionist) with other opposition forces. This change in tactics was relatively profound as the leaders of the movement invested significant energy to mobilise their grass roots in this new direction, with a certain degree of success. The movement's strategic framing rested to a large extent on the mobilisation of emotions, or rather a combination of them, especially the moral battery charged with hope and indignation. The mobilisation of emotions does not by itself explain the continuity of anarchist activism in the harsh conditions of the underground struggle, but it is impossible to understand this high-risk activism without making reference to emotions. Of course, to emphasise the anarchists’ emotional work is not to suggest, however, as Rothbard does, that they made no use of reason. In fact, reason and emotions were both essential elements in the symbolic construction of the movement.
In spite of the ‘return of the repressed’ in social movement studies, there still remain important and little explored areas in relation to emotions. One of these is the combination and interaction of emotions in collective action.Footnote 87 Most existing studies focus on one emotion in particular and its role in the emergence, development and decline of a particular movement. Another relatively unexplored area is the historical evolution of the emotions. Scholars focus overwhelmingly on short-term changes.Footnote 88 This article has attempted to contribute to fill these gaps by providing a longitudinal analysis of the emotional language and the combination of emotions in anarchists’ discourse (and practices) under Franco's dictatorship. It has also sought to be multi-level in order to observe how emotional discourses mediated in the attribution of opportunities for mobilisation and how specific events and political processes reinforced the subjective patterns of micro-mobilisation, as well as having a significant effect on changes at the organisational and strategic level.
