CHAPTER X. The Revolutionary Center of Paris

García Vivancos arrived in Barcelona in late November 1923 feeling discouraged about his trip to the Asturian capital. At first things had looked promising when he landed in Oviedo: a soldier in the regiment guarding the Oviedo prison promised to mobilize his comrades to help break Torres Escartín out. The plan’s pieces slowly fell into place and, when it was nearly time to execute it, everything was ruined: soldiers from another regiment took over prison security. García Vivancos now had to work to secure the collaboration of a whole new squad of guards. He immediately began to sound things out, but began to worry when the police questioned him about his activities in Oviedo. While he had a good alibi—documents indicating that he was a traveling knitwear salesman—and the interrogation went well, it seemed clear that the guards had not been transferred by accident. He left Oviedo at once. [134]

Although García Vivancos failed to organize Torres Escartín’s escape, the Zaragoza comrades were successful and the jailbreak from Predicadores was a complete triumph. The majority of the escapees left for France immediately. “El Negro” was among them—a native of Aragón with a long police record due to his revolutionary activities in Madrid—who had concealed his identity by using a false name when authorities arrested him and Inocencio Pina in Zaragoza. Francisco Ascaso was the most compromised of all. Buenacasa tried to convince him to go to France right away, but he was determined to visit Barcelona first. [135]

Los Solidarios held an important meeting when García Vivancos returned to the Catalan capital. It emerged that General Martínez Anido, Interior Minister and member of Primo de Rivera’s military junta, had a special interest in crushing what he called the “Durruti gang” and had sent several of his best men to Barcelona to accomplish the task. Martínez Anido’s antipathy toward the group only increased with Ascaso’s escape. Under such circumstances, Ascaso and Durruti’s lives were in great danger. The group decided that the two should go to Paris, where they would set up a revolutionary center to help a similar one established in Barcelona. They would also start a press in collaboration with the French Anarcho-Communist Union (ACU) to produce international anarchist propaganda. The group gave them a significant portion of what remained from the Gijón robbery to carry out these missions.

At the time, the ACU office occupied the ground floor of a building at 14 Petit Street in Paris’s district nineteen. Books on sale and the front page of the anarchist weekly Le Libertaire were displayed behind its storefront window. A narrow hallway led into a room lined with shelves, weighted down with French language anarchist books and pamphlets. In the back, there was a room used for everything: storage, editing, running the newspaper, and ACU administration. The administrator, Severino Ferrandel, was there daily and attended to tasks such as book and newspaper sales and also received the visitors from Paris or the provinces that came in search of literature or news. The bookstore became more crowded in the evening, after work hours. Louis Lecoin was one of the usual hosts. He was busy with the campaign to stop the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists who would ultimately die in the electric chair in the United States.

Ascaso and Durruti went to the Petit Street building as soon as they arrived in Paris. They spoke with Ferrandel and his young compañera, Berthe Favert, explaining that they wanted to talk with the comrades responsible for ACU organizational matters. Ferrandel brought them to the back room, where Durruti and Ascaso met several of these militants. They outlined their plan after the brief introductions. The ACU men responded with interest but also some skepticism. Plans? Anarchists have plenty of plans, what they lack is the money to carry them out. When the Spaniards announced that they were able to contribute a large sum of cash so that they could take the first steps, the discussion took a new turn and they agreed to hold another meeting to lay the foundations of the publishing project. They met again several days later. Sebastián Faure, Valeriano Orobón Fernández, and Virgilio Gozzoli were in attendance. Durruti and Ascaso handed over 500,000 francs. [136] They decided to publish an international, tri-lingual magazine (French, Spanish, and Italian), which would mark the inauguration of the International Anarchist Press. The Anarchist Encyclopedia planned by Sebastián Faure would be the press’s first book. Once the meeting was over and they left the building, Francisco Ascaso and Buenaventura Durruti reflected on the future. If they were very frugal, they had enough money to support themselves for a month, but a month goes by quickly and so they had to find work right away.

Although it was easy to justify expending money stolen in Gijón on the “historic rifles of Eibar” and the International Press, Spanish newspapers ran articles implying that these two spent extravagantly and wastefully. These stories were repeated time and again, including in the book that Police Captain Eduardo Comín Colomer wrote years later about police “killed in action.” The captain claimed that: “After all the crimes carried out, the members of the Crisol group distributed fifteen thousand pesetas per head. Luis Muñoz, a native of Iniesta (Cuenca), sent his ‘take’ to his family, in addition to another two thousand that he had ‘saved.’ This enabled them to buy land.” [137] Comín Colomer then states that Luis Muñoz was one of the perpetrators of the holdup in Gijón, identifies him as a member of the Crisol group (not the right name), and asserts that he killed policeman López Solorzano, a death for which he was arrested on June 13, 1923. This is an enormous blunder, given that it is public knowledge that the robbery in Gijón took place more than two months later. Here error and slander make good company, especially when inspired by a desire to discredit anarchism in the eyes of “responsible public opinion.”

In early January 1924, Francisco Ascaso and Buenaventura Durruti settled in Paris, not in Marseilles, as La Voz de Guipúzcoa incorrectly stated. They went there not to carry out holdups, as that newspaper claimed, but to support themselves through their work; Durruti was a mechanic with the Renault Company and Ascaso, despite his noted pulmonary ailment, worked as a laborer in a plumbing tube factory (a job that aggravated his illness).

Most of the émigrés in France at the time were Spanish, as a result of the dictatorship and Martínez Anido’s persecution, and most concentrated in the French Midi: Toulouse, Marseilles, Béziers, etc. The Spanish anarchists soon felt a need for organization, although in reality there had always been a degree of organization among Spanish political exiles in the country. In his memoirs, Anselmo Lorenzo notes that when he fled to Marseilles in the previous century he met a group of Spaniards as soon as he arrived and that they helped him find work as a typesetter. We have also seen that Durruti secured employment thanks to help provided by anarchist groups on French soil when he was a refugee in 1918. [138] After 1920, the number of exiles rose with the intensification of Martínez Anido’s terrorism and especially following Primo de Rivera’s coup. The existing organizational bases made it easy to accommodate newcomers, but naturally their arrival generated greater needs, particularly for propaganda. New publications appeared, such as Liberación, which later became Iberión after police suspended the former, and Tiempos Nuevos, which became Voz Libertaria for the same reason.

Over time, all these subversive activities—propaganda and various actions—culminated in the foundation of a strong Anarchist Federation of Spanish-speaking Groups in Exile, which anticipated what would later be the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI).

Durruti and Ascaso relied on these exiled anarchists as they established themselves in the Parisian workers’ district known as Belleville, where many other Spaniards lived.

Despite the pervasive repression in Spain, spirits were high among Spanish anarchist exiles and many hoped to return to the country in the near future. Of course the idea was not to go back in resignation, but as a force that would overthrow the dictatorship. On December 30, 1923, the CNT held a meeting in Spain at which they prepared to put the CNT’s underground apparatus into operation. At this meeting, it looked like the conflict had been settled with the Bolshevik sympathizers (who still tried to obstruct the CNT’s new scheme of emergency organization). This further increased the optimism among exiles as well as their desire to help the organization. But if the Spaniards were upbeat, the same cannot be said of the other groups of anarchist exiles, such as the Italians and Russians, who passed their own problems onto the French. The Russian Revolution had created a divide among anarchists and was the primary source of the difficulties. Some Russian anarchists found extenuating circumstances to justify the Bolshevik’s terrorist methods and their oppression of Kronstandt and Makhno. Others, as if to confirm the defeat, wanted to transform the anarchist movement into a party and infuse it with a Bolshevik spirit in the name of efficiency.

Some of the Italians had drawn the same conclusion as the Russians, although in their case it was the apparent need for a united front against Italian fascists that pushed them in that direction. However, they were not split quite as sharply as the Russians, thanks to the influence of Enrique Malatesta, who denounced the Bolshevik dictatorship and its authoritarianism. Camilo Berneri, who arrived in Paris after escaping from Italy, reinforced Malatesta’s position.

The problem was most serious among the French. Anarchists had virtually lost their influence on the workers’ movement. The Socialists dominated the CGT and the Communists, enthusiastically using anarchist methods, entrenched themselves in the CGTU. [139] Bolshevism had dazzled activists of great value, like Pierre Monatte, who influenced a large number of anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists. Although they didn’t join the French Communist Party, they adopted an ambiguous and intermediate posture that weakened the anarchist movement, which slowly shrank and surrendered itself to empty debates over means and ends, theory and practice. These abstract disputes removed them even further from the proletariat’s daily concerns, which is a path that leads to death not life.

Durruti and Ascaso reflected on the course of the Russian Revolution and thought that it could be an example to revolutionaries worldwide about what should and should not be done. To argue that the revolution necessarily had to descend into the dictatorship of the few was to renounce revolution itself. That would imply that radicals would have to trust only in the slow evolution of society, in the hope that it would follow a straight and progressive path. History had already revealed that as a falsehood. It made more sense—they thought—to appreciate the particular circumstances of the Russian Revolution, which made its results quite logical. The revolution emerged during a war and the war itself had denatured it, crushing the most conscious part of the revolutionary vanguard, which also unfortunately lacked a strong libertarian perspective.

It was only the Bolshevik Party that had emerged from the disaster of the First World War with solid structures and really knew where it was going and what it wanted. It wanted power and subordinated all its actions to that goal, while disingenuously calling for “all power to the Soviets”. After seizing power, the Bolsheviks did what they had to do: use every trick, coercion, and terrorist measure to hold on to it. When a few have power, the rest are subordinate. With the Bolsheviks triumphant, Kronstandt and later the Ukraine were to be the swan songs of the real Russian Revolution. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, but anarchism would have needed to have penetrated the Russia soul, as it had that of the Ukrainians and those of Kronstandt. Could that have happened? Answering such a question required a deeper analysis of Russia and its problems and neither Durruti nor Ascaso—who were primarily men of action—wanted to lose themselves in labyrinths of conjecture.

They knew that when anarchists have a greater influence on a revolution, that revolution is more libertarian. This is why they were consumed with the idea that what they had to do was to develop the revolutionary capacity of the classes exploited by capital and the state to the utmost, not cross their arms and enclose themselves in endless debates. It was the exploited classes who were called upon to subvert the dominant economic, political, and social structures. They alone would be the source of the new forms of social and political life that would arise from the revolution. The anarchists had to detonate situations that had become explosive and only needed to be ignited. Through continuous action, theory would become practical and practice theoretical. Revolutionary practice was the best school of revolutionary theory.

The subject of revolution was the principal topic of discussion when Durruti and Ascaso spoke with their anarchist comrades of any nationality. Optimism ran high whenever they were present, and theory stopped being a dogma and took on forms of practice, of life. “Walking, we make the road,” Ascaso used to say, paraphrasing Malatesta’s statement that “of things, things are born.” What was important was to be active and, with so many issues prodding them into action, Durruti and Ascaso were in a perpetual state of ferment. While Paris went through a period of clarification, Spain, especially Barcelona, suffered bloody, often fatal repression. The liberal Catalan bourgeoisie stopped accepting Primo de Rivera’s promises that he would give Catalonia administrative autonomy and soon felt the full force of the dictatorship. The government dismissed the president of the Mancomunidad, Puig I Cadafalch, put the monarchist Alfonso Sala in his place, and then suppressed the institution altogether. [140] The coup de grace came in May 1924 when state outlawed the use of the Catalan flag and language.

Although the dictator concentrated his brutality against Catalonia, he hardly limited it to its liberal class. What really bothered him was Catalonia’s proletariat and especially the CNT. Of course Martínez Anido, Primo de Rivera’s executive arm, had old accounts to settle with Los Solidarios and worked tirelessly to destroy the group from the moment he took over the Interior Ministry. And, indeed, he achieved a measure of success, thanks to his network of informers. The Solidarios’ first warning came when the police discovered one of their armories in the Pueblo Nuevo workers’ district. Although they took new precautions thereafter and distanced themselves from people who seemed questionable, it was already too late. The police went into action on March 24, 1924.

They surprised Gregorio Suberviela at home, but he managed to shoot his way out. He descended the stairs of his flat and crossed the street but the police, who were taking cover in the doorways of neighboring houses, had him surrounded. An escape would have been a miracle. Thus, in the middle of street, in full view of the neighbors, one of the most complete revolutionaries that Pamplona had ever produced was shot down. Police never knew that they killed a participant in the Gijón bank robbery and José Regueral’s executioner.

Marcelino del Campo, Tomás Arrate, and other militants also fell, although in different ways. Two undercover police introduced themselves to Marcelino as “persecuted comrades.” He feigned to believe them and said that he would take them to a safe house in the country, where they would find “trusted comrades.” His goal was to get them out of Barcelona and then shoot them. His ploy failed. In hopes of capturing him alive, police pounced upon him as he went into the street. He drew his pistol and killed two of them, but quickly became the third casualty. Police raided Aurelio Fernández’s house at almost the same time that Gregorio and Marcelino fell. His brothers Ceferino and Adolfo Ballano were with him. The three descended the stairs in handcuffs after they were arrested. However, the police became careless once they reached the street, perhaps because it has been so easy to detain them and also because they didn’t know that they had seized another one of the Gijón bank robbers. Aurelio took advantage of this to push his brother into the police’s path and, with both Ceferino and Adolfo in their way, he escaped through the twisting and turning streets that made up Barcelona’s so-called “Chinatown.” Francisco Ascaso’s brother Domingo, a true escape artist and suspicious by nature, heard the police enter the stairway of his building and lowered himself from his fourth floor apartment with a rope that he kept precisely for such a purpose.

Police surely thought that Gregorio Jover, who had recently joined the group, was a simple collaborator and were not particularly vigilant after arresting him. Gregorio took advantage of this to jump through a police station window and flee.

If Martínez Anido thought this raid had crushed Los Solidarios, he was completely mistaken. Ricardo Sanz, García Oliver, Aurelio Fernández, Domingo Ascaso, Alfonso Miguel, and Gregorio Jover were still in action. Alfonso Miguel and Ricardo Sanz covered Gregorio Suberviela and Marcelino del Campo’s responsibilities in the Revolutionary Committee. No one could find Domingo Ascaso. García Oliver spent several days searching for him when, to García’s surprise, it was Domingo who found him. Domingo told him that he needed to go to Paris, so that he, Francisco, and Durruti could accelerate the revolutionary preparations in Spain. When they parted, García asked where he had hid and Domingo told him in the Pueblo Nuevo cemetery. Indeed, a close friend of Domingo’s, an old man from Aragón, worked there as a gravedigger and had harbored him in one of the mausoleums. Domingo told Oliver: “The best hiding place is among the dead. They don’t speak!” [141]

By picking on the Catalanists, Primo de Rivera, only created new allies for the anarchists. When the government outlawed the Catalan flag and language, the Catalanists from the Estat Català group—created by Colonel Francesc Macià in 1922—sought out contact with anarchist groups. Ricardo Sanz claims that they were even members of the Revolutionary Committee operating in Barcelona during the period. [142] In May, shortly after the Estat Català joined the struggle and the raid that we described above, the CNT called a national meeting in Sabadell. The meeting transpired normally until the end, when police invaded the building. They had fortunately prepared an escape route in advance and the majority of the participants got away. García Oliver had also fled, but police arrested him at the train station. Tried and sentenced, they sent him to the Burgos penitentiary, where he would remain for six long years.

Domingo Ascaso’s mission was to accelerate the revolutionary process by launching a guerrilla strike from the Catalan Pyrenees that would facilitate the liberation of the hundreds of anarchist prisoners incarcerated in the Figueras penitentiary. Parallel to the Pyrenees action, they would unleash an insurgency in Barcelona with the support of soldiers from the Atarazanas barracks. For the success of the Barcelona operation, they counted on taking possession of the arms bought in Eibar that were being stored in the Barcelona port. [143]

Domingo Ascaso communicated this plan to Durruti and Francisco, who were already beginning to tire of the Parisian environment—which seemed to consist of nothing but endless meetings. They wanted desperately to go into action and were excited by the plan, despite its risks. According to Domingo, the first thing they had to do was size up the comrades—without informing anyone about the matter—in order to be sure that they could carry out the action with solid people. Barcelona would send someone to tell the militants in France when they were ready.

Their delegate turned out to be Gregorio Jover, who arrived in July 1925, when the project was already well underway. All the Barcelona groups had expressed their support and the committed soldiers even reaffirmed their desire to participate in a move against the dictatorship. They assembled various comrades in Paris for an “important meeting.” Once everyone had gathered, Gregorio Jover explained the undertaking. Everyone declared their willingness to partake in the guerrilla operation. They appointed a commission at the meeting to organize the expedition and acquire weapons. The Ascaso brothers, Durruti, and García Vivancos took on the task. The latter turned out to be particularly well suited for the job. He quickly made contact with a Belgian arms dealer who sold rifles with one hundred cartridges at thirty francs each. [144]

They had fully sketched out the Pyrenean offensive by late September. The weapons purchased—each participant chipped in money to buy them— were not rifles, but pistols of various calibers.

While things advanced in Paris, problems arose in Barcelona: the soldiers started to cool off, Los Solidarios were unable to get the arms stored in the port, and now there was the risk that the weapons might be returned to the so-called Zulueta. Likewise, some militants began to voice skepticism about the likelihood of the revolutionary spirit erupting among Barcelona’s workers, the driving force of Spanish social struggles.

When they learned about the situation in Barcelona, some of the comrades in Paris also began to vacillate. This became apparent at a meeting called precisely to discuss the insurgency. Those who were committed to it did their best to convince the skeptics. Durruti and Ascaso were the most dedicated to the undertaking, perhaps because their optimism demanded such continued and dramatic activity. However, in this case, in which participants were risking their lives, it was difficult to compel the unwilling to partake. Nonetheless, Durruti spoke to the group, not to persuade anyone, but simply to make some points that he considered elemental for understanding revolutionary action:

When, how, and in what way can we know that “things” are ready? Yes, it’s true that the news from Barcelona is not very encouraging, but it’s no less true that the basic preconditions necessary for a revolutionary action exist and are emerging, at least in Catalonia, and especially in Barcelona. The dictator has picked a fight with the Catalanists, but has only made new friends for us by doing so. He exiles intellectuals like Unamuno and Soriano, sows discontent among the middle class, and practices the most shameless favoritism. The war in Morocco is dragging on, and the soldiers don’t want to go there and die. Don’t you see positive elements in all this, especially when linked to the conditions of the peasantry and the working class in certain regions? Of course there are negatives, but it’s the clash between the positive and the negative that produces the spark. We have the right and the obligation to force the negative to clash with the positive and cause the spark. Is that adventurism? Then I say that all revolutions have been triggered by adventurists. Yes, it’s possible that we’re wrong and that we’ll pay with our lives or end up in prison. That’s conceivable. But I’m certain sure that rebellions like this are not in vain and that they bring us a closer to the generalized revolt.

I’m not trying to convince anyone. An act like this has to be done by people committed to the basic ideas that I’ve outlined tonight.

Durruti’s speech was not meant to set alight fleeting enthusiasms. It was not a leader’s harangue, but simply clear speech among revolutionaries. How were his words understood? We don’t know, but none of the committed comrades were absent on the day of the action. [145] Shortly after this meeting several things occurred that were going to enhance the likelihood of the guerrilla action’s success. Unamuno and Soriano arrived in Paris after escaping from the Canary Islands and the editor of Le Quotidien put the pages of his newspaper at their disposal so that they could voice their criticisms of the dictatorship and Spain’s socio-political conditions.

Likewise, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, the celebrated novelist from Valencia, perhaps embarrassed by his retiring life in Menton, plucked up the courage to join the fray and signed his name to a French-language pamphlet denouncing Alfonso XIII and the militarist terror in Spain.

There were good reasons to be upbeat about the guerrilla operation. Orobón Fernández, one of the participants, describes it as follows:

Comrades impatiently awaited the telegram in Paris, Lyon, Perpignan, Marseilles, and in every French city where anarchist groups existed. Those of us who lived through those moments of combative fever will never forget them. We all knew that we would have to assemble on the border when the telegram came and cross it fighting tooth and nail against the border police. Everyone was aware that we were going to battle large, well-organized, and better armed forces than ours. Many would pay with their lives, although the revolutionary action would ultimately succeed. We didn’t care about the risks. Liberty is well worth many lives!

The telegram arrived and we quickly set off for the border in groups of ten or twelve, taking a pistol as the only weapon, acquired at the cost of who knows how many hardships. In the Quai d’Orsay train station, the departure point for those in Paris, we could see [Domingo] Ascaso handing out tickets to the comrades before he boarded with the final contingent, carrying heavy suitcases loaded with twenty-five Winchesters, the longest arms of the expedition.

As agreed, the comrades in Barcelona set out to take the Atarazanas artillery barracks. To avoid attracting attention, they approached in very small groups. They intended to attack with grenades at 6:00 am.

Atarazanas is in Barcelona’s fifth district, which has always been a well-watched neighborhood. Barricades always appear first there and it is also the home to the Solidaridad Obrera printing press, the editorial offices of Tierra y Libertad and Crisol, the Wood Worker and Construction worker unions, and the many comrades who like to live close to their centers and newspapers. Due to the pervasive surveillance, and despite all the precautions taken, the police must have noticed something. One of the groups heading toward the barracks found itself blocked by a guard patrol, which tried to arrest them. This caused a heavy shootout, which left one guard dead and another injured. The panic spread and the police—executioners armed with machineguns—surrounded the barracks. It was impossible to carry out the planned attack.

Police arrested Comrades Montejo and Llácer nearby. They were summarily judged and executed. They faced death with great fortitude.

Given the failure of the Barcelona action, those of us going to the border didn’t have the slightest chance of success.

The comrades who left for Vera and Hendaya, which were the points closest to Paris, arrived eighteen hours before those who went to the other sites along the border. They took care of the first detachment that they encountered, but were later surprised by superior forces after an exhausting march through the mountains. They had to retreat while fighting. Two comrades were killed, one seriously injured, and the others were arrested two days later, some of whom were executed in Pamplona. The rest will be tried and their hearings will likely be taking place when this correspondence is published.

When those who were going to attack the border near Figueras and Gerona reached Perpignan, they read about the Vera events in the newspapers. They had arrived eighteen hours too late! Of the nearly one thousand comrades that met in Perpignan, many had to disperse, others were captured, and only some fifty could escape the security forces and take the suitcases of Winchesters and bullets up to the slopes of the Pyrenees. A comrade from a small Spanish village met them there, who was to guide them through the mountains to Figueras, where they would attack the prison holding a large number of comrades, including Elías García, Pedro Mateu, Sancho Alegre, Clascu, and the accused of Cullera. Our guide told us the bad news: several regiments were waiting along the border, with machine-guns and artillery. The authorities had taken significant defensive measures and thus we were unable to attack by surprise, which was one of the principal factors of success.

Our undertaking was impossible.

Crying with rage and anger, and a little ashamed at having been defeated without a fight, we had to return to our points of departure. That day, in the middle of the mountain, a thousand meters above the sea, I saw many of those fifty men cry, lamenting that they had been unable to give their lives to the revolution.

Ascaso was among them. Durruti among those of Vera. Jover with those who attacked the Atarazanas barracks in Barcelona.

It was a naïve attempt, clumsy, whatever you want; but those men possessed a great revolutionary passion and for this they deserve everyone’s respect. They failed, that is all. We have failed so many times, but one day we will triumph![146]

What does it mean to fail? Failing in relation to what? Those in Barcelona and the Pyrenees who rose up in November 1924 were not trying to seize power and didn’t believe that they alone would bring down the dictatorship. They only wanted to demonstrate that it was time to stop being afraid. And they didn’t achieve it because those who had to defeat fear were defeated by it. That is all.

But it soon became clear that Alfonso XIII and his dictator were truly frightened. Martínez Anido sent operatives to France to discredit the action’s organizers by spreading rumors designed to make it seem that the whole thing had been a police conspiracy. Parallel to this disinformation campaign, Alfonso XIII’s government undertook another, more efficient action: it pressed the French government to move against Spanish anarchists living in France.

This had immediate results: homes were searched, arrests were made, and people expelled. Many of the participants in the uprising went to Belgium and others set off for South America.

Despite the fact that the police were searching for them actively, Ascaso and Durruti did not want to leave France before finding out more about the situation in Barcelona and the new activities planned by the Revolutionary Committee. While waiting for this information, they holed up in the outskirts of Paris in a house provided by some Parisian anarchists.

They did not have to wait for long. The Revolutionary Committee in Barcelona sent Ricardo Sanz to tell Ascaso and Durruti about the organization’s dreadful circumstances and how it urgently needed money. They thought that an excursion to Latin America might be a solution, enabling them to arouse emigrants’ interest in developments in Spain as well as collect the much-needed funds.

Thus, using false passports, Durruti and Ascaso set off for the Americas from the port of Le Havre in late December 1924.