We must now try to see how remarkably well Bakunin’s ideas suited the needs of a revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ movement in Spain.

To nineteenth-century liberalism, the problems of Spain could be reduced to a classic formula: a backward agrarian country, faced with the tasks of land reform, industrial development, and the creation of a middle-class democratic state. The parallel with France on the eve of the Great Revolution is unmistakable: a liberal bourgeoisie, demanding a governing voice in the state; an absolute monarchy, passing into an advanced state of decomposition; a stagnant nobility, lost in darkening memories of its past grandeur; a reactionary church, steeped in medievalism; and a savagely exploited working class and impoverished, land-hungry peasantry. The consciousness of this parallel, almost bordering on fatalism, was so strong that Spanish political factions often modeled themselves on Jacobins, Girondins, Royalists, and Bonapartists.

But there were many profound differences between Spain in the nineteenth century and France in the eighteenth. Some of them, such as the emergence of a modern industrial proletariat, could be explained by the passage of time. Others, however, were peculiar to Spain, and had few historical precedents. It is these differences that account for the extraordinary popularity of Bakunin’s Anarchism below the Pyrenees.

The most striking characteristic of the Iberian Peninsula is its startling variety—its variety of landscapes, land tenure, cultural features, and social forms. It is the sudden changes in topography that catch the attention of a traveler in Spain. Within a few hours, one can pass from green, rolling country, with well-watered soil and abundant crops, to baked, arid plains, more reminiscent of North Africa than of Europe. “The north western provinces,” observed an English traveler a century ago, “are more rainy than Devonshire, while the center plains are more calcined than those of the deserts of Arabia, and the littoral south or eastern coasts altogether Algerian.”

For Spain, this has meant not only different forms of land tenure, but different types of agrarian unrest. In the well-watered mountainous north, the agricultural economy had long solidified around small, well-tended farms, based on mixed crops and dairy produce. Here, the democratic traditions of pre-Muslim Spain were firmly rooted, and independent peasants, tenants, and rentiers mixed on an easy, almost egalitarian basis. The long heritage of communal life, almost neolithic in origin, had produced a deeply conservative outlook whose spiritual focus was the church and whose anti-Christ was the emerging industrial world with its unsettling values, its startling products, and its invasive claims on village autonomy. The small, dull-colored villages of this great northern region, each hugging its hilltop or mountain ledge like a fortress, lived out their fixed cycles of daily life by the incantations of dogmatic, often fanatical priests and by codes that often went beyond the memory of the most venerable myths.

By the nineteenth century, these villages had emerged from lethargy and isolation to face a world of social and economic upheaval. In their volatile response, revolt took the anachronistic form of permanent counterrevolution. United by a passionate Catholicism, by an embattled sense of local independence, and by deeply rooted communal and patriarchal traditions, the peasantry of the northern mountains provided the largest single reservoir of political reaction in Spain. In the years to follow, these parochial villages produced wave after wave of peasant militia—fearsome men armed with scythes, cudgels, and antique guns—led by village priests with a sinister reputation for butchery. The first of these waves rolled against Napoleon, who personified not only the traditional French invader but also the detested French Revolution. Later, in two bloody civil wars, the northern peasantry took up arms in support of the Carlist line. We shall see that as the nineteenth century drew to a close, new social forces were to dilute this reservoir of reaction with liberal, even Socialist, ideals; nevertheless, it was from the small landowners of the mountains of Navarre and nearby areas that General Franco was to recruit the most enthusiastic domestic masses for his infantry in 1936.

If the north could be regarded as the reactionary Vendee of the French Revolution, the Meseta could be regarded as its moderate Gironde. On this great, treeless, windswept plateau of central Spain, reaction shaded into a cautious liberalism. From the time of the Reconquest, when the Moors were driven from the Iberian Peninsula, the Castilians of the central Meseta have regarded themselves as the wellsprings of Spanish culture and the indisputable heirs of the Spanish state. All other inhabitants of Spain are viewed as social inferiors. Yet rarely in history has a “master race” been confined to a more inhospitable region of the country under its control. The Meseta has a harsh, erratic climate. Its soil, in the absence of irrigation works, is poor and demanding. During Fanelli’s day, a traveler would have found all the conditions for chronic agrarian revolts: large estates, owned by absentee aristocrats and newly rich bourgeois, existing side by side with small, wretched farms. Usury and land speculation burdened the plateau to a point where many of the lesser nobility were reduced to the material status of a peasant. A large population of tenant families, working the land under precarious, short-term leases, eked out a miserable subsistence livelihood and were totally indifferent to the needs of the soil.

But this potential for agrarian revolt rarely exploded into a major uprising. In contrast to the north, where the church had shrewdly deflected peasant dissatisfaction into reactionary channels, on the Meseta, chauvinism served more as a political instrument of the central government in Madrid (and here any comparisons with the French Girondins end) than as the foundations of a coherent reactionary ideology. Nearly all social classes, wealthy and poor, upheld the supremacy of the central government over Carlism and regionalism, but beyond this chauvinistic umbrella, allegiances tended to follow economic lines. The landed aristocracy of the Meseta, like its peers elsewhere in Spain, remained Catholic and conservative; the rural bourgeoisie tended to support the policies of moderate liberalism, when social unrest did not stampede it into reactionary causes. The great mass of peasants and tenants were politically inert throughout most of the nineteenth century, the objects of manipulation by the large landowners; eventually, however, they drifted into orderly, bureaucratic Socialist unions.

All further analogies with the French Revolution come to an end the moment one passes southward through the Sierra Morena, one of the most important mountain barriers in Spain. North of the Morena lies classical Spain: stern, morally rigid, obsessed by an unyielding sense of responsibility and duty. To the south lies Andalusia: easygoing, pleasure-loving, and delightfully impulsive. This large, populous region had been successively colonized by Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, German barbarian tribes, and Moors. The Moors held Andalusia for nearly five centuries and left behind a hedonistic tradition that survived the Holy Inquisition, the auto-da-fe, and the rule of sullen Castilian bureaucrats. The Romans, who held the region even longer than the Moors, left behind the latifundium, a plantation economy based on gang labor and bestial conditions of exploitation.

The latifundium could well be described as the agrarian ulcer of the Mediterranean world and in many respects bears comparison with the plantation economy of the antebellum American South. Historically rooted in slavery, the two shared identical traditions of labor management and common forms of land tenure. In the cotton districts around Seville, even the crops were the same. Most of the Andalusian latifundia cultivated olives, grapes, and grain—the typical crop pattern of Mediterranean agriculture. The long rainless summers of the region posed formidable problems of moisture conservation. In the absence of agricultural machinery, specially adapted to dry farming, large-tracts of land had to be left fallow and sown for crops every second or third year. The largest estates tended to congregate in the Guadalquiver valley, the huge triangular basin that lies between the Sierra Morena and the mountain chains of the southern coast. It was here, in the best lands of the most fertile districts of Andalusia, that one found the largest holdings, the immense masses of gang labor, and those grotesque economic contrasts that gave the region its reputation for misery and agrarian rebellion.

In Andalusia, as far back as Roman times, two classes stood opposed to each other: the land magnates and a huge population of landless laborers. If the land magnate lived on his estate, his presence was feared by all. If he lived in the cities, as was so often the case, the task of managing his properties was left to stewards who mercilessly extracted every bit of labor from the gang workers beneath them. Between this handful of land magnates and the great mass of landless there existed a chasm that few of the institutions of official Spain could bridge. The church alone had been capable of doing so, but with its declining influence in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the last links were broken. It was here, on these immense estates of the south, that Spanish Anarchism was to find massive popular support.

To the west of the Meseta, in Estremadura, a traveler found a wild arid region stretching from the central plateau to the Portuguese frontier. Most of the land was held by a few absentee owners and cultivated by theyunteros, a class of rural proletarians who owned nothing but their mule teams. Work was seasonal, often uncertain, and rewarded by pittances. Further northward in Galicia, Spain’s westernmost province, rural life had sunk to an incredibly low material level. If Andalusia was the land of the latifundium, Galicia could be called the land of the minifundium, of plots so small that they could scarcely support a single family. Turning to the east, along the Mediterranean coastal region, the provinces of Valencia and Murcia (the Spanish Levant) included irrigated vegas (plains) which were parceled into small prosperous holdings of orange growers and inland mountain areas stricken by bitter poverty. Politically, the landlords of the vegas vacillated between the Liberal and Conservative parties. The peasants of the mountain region were destined to provide some of the most militant Anarchists in Spain.

The uniformity of these major agricultural regions, however, is more apparent than real. Within Andalusia, for example, mountain districts contained mostly small holdings and communally owned pasture. In the lowlands there were many small farmsteads, worked by peasant owners and tenants. In the mountainous north, the highlands of Aragon, supported the impoverished sheepherders of the Maestrazzo—people who were to be drawn to Carlism not because they shared the material prosperity of their northern brethren, but on the contrary, because they did not. In the steppe country of Aragon, the*chronic material poverty generated by a combination of large estates, usury, and land hunger provided a hospitable climate for Anarchism. In the vegas of the south, Granada was to form an enclave of socialism, despite the surrounding Anarchist sentiment of the rural laborers, while in the reactionary mountainous north, islands of Anarchists and Anarchosyndicalist unions were to emerge in distant Galicia, in Asturias, and in the wine-growing districts of the upper Ebro valley.

Spain, however, is a land of startling contrasts not only in its geography and land tenure. The contrasts extend also to cultures which, in the case of the Basques and Catalans, verge on fairly distinct nations. The Basques occupy the Atlantic area of the north forming a corner with France, in which live another sizable portion of their people. Basque is an ancient language unrelated to any other in Europe. A deeply pious, outwardly stern people, whose sense of self-discipline is relaxed in buoyant songs and satiric pantomines, the Basques succeeded in holding firmly to their independence and unique ways of life for centuries. Economically oriented toward Atlantic Europe, they managed to resist Latinization and only nominally fell under Roman rule. During the Middle Ages, they successfully kept Visigothic, Frankish, and Moorish invaders from occupying their ancestral lands. For two centuries, between the tenth and thirteenth, nearly all the Basques of Spain were united in the Navarrese kingdom—the Christian kingdom that played so large a part in the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors.

The advance of the Castilian state in the Meseta gradually pared away their liberties, driving them into unsuccessful revolts and finally into the Carlist camp. In the meantime, their ports began to grow and their trade with Europe expanded steadily. Bilboa, owing to its proximity to high-grade iron-ore mines and the Asturian coal fields, soon became the most important steel-produdng city in Spain. Basque financiers played a leading role in all phases of the Spanish economy and Basque shipping magnates succeeded in gathering the bulk of Spanish merchant tonnage into their hands. This industrial and financial bourgeoisie, one of the most modern and businesslike in Spain, soon began to subsidize a moderate nationalist movement— devoutly Catholic in religion, liberal in economic policy, reformist in social program and politics. The Basque working class, recruited largely from the conservative peasantry of the coastal mountains, was never infused with the kind of revolutionary fervor that emanated from Barcelona. Although some steel workers turned to Anarchosyndicalism, the majority of the Basque workers divided their loyalties between Catholic and Socialist unions.

Traditionally oriented toward the north, beyond the Pyrenees, Catalonia was never an organic part of Spain. Rather, it belonged to the vigorous, progressive langue d’oc civilization of southern France, and northern Italy. The Catalan language is akin to Provencal, not to Spanish, although both are Latin tongues. The “crusade” against the Albigensian heresy in the thirteenth century shattered this colorful world but left many of its cultural roots intact. Definitively separated from France, their trade ruined by the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, the Catalans were compelled to turn away from the north and look toward the Iberian Peninsula. They never liked what they saw. A sophisticated merchant people, with an urbane cultural lineage of their own, the Catalans never ceased to harbor separatist tendencies. By the early nineteenth century, the centrifugal forces created by culture were reinforced by industrial development. At a point in history when all the institutions of the Castilian state in Madrid were in visible decomposition, a viable industrial bourgeoisie and proletariat had emerged not in the center of Spain, but on its periphery. The Basque country and Catalonia each presented economic, political, and cultural demands that threatened to undermine the entire traditional structure of Spain as it had been known since the Reconquest.

Even more threatening to the centralized state than regional nationalism is the intense localism of Spanish social life: the patria chica (literally, “small fatherland”), an almost untranslatable term that denotes the. village and its immediate region—in short, the living arena of the rural Spaniard’s world.

The Spanish word for village is pueblo. Pueblo also means “people,” and this is by no means accidental. J.A. Pitt-Rivers, who devoted years of study to Spanish village life in Andalusia, notes that “the Greek word for polis far more nearly translates ‘pueblo’ than any English word, for the community is not merely a geographical or political unit, but the unit of society in every context. The pueblo furnishes a completeness of human relations which make it the prime concept of all social thought.”[4]

For the traditional pueblo, this completeness involved not only a deep sense of moral unity, common purpose, and mutual aid, but also a body of rights, or fueros, which defined the community’s autonomy in local affairs and protected it from the encroachment of outside authority. Many fueros were born from the needs of the Reconquest, when the kings of Spain granted local privileges for military aid against the Moors. Others were granted by the monarchy in order to gain municipal support against intractable nobles and military orders. But there were fueros, such as those of the Basques, which were never “granted” at all, indeed, which go back to a far-distant time when chiefs and later monarchs were democratically elected by popular village assemblies. Elena de La Souchere observes that the Moorish invasion, by shattering the Romano-Germanic state, indirectly fostered the resurrection of these very early social forms. The Iberians of the northern mountains who had successfully resisted Roman, German, and Moorish influence were destined not only to spearhead the Reconquest, “but to perfect and even bring back to other parts of the country their peculiar institutions and customs.”

That the fueros retained their vitality after the Reconquest was due, ironically, to the nature of the Spanish monarchy and to its impact on economic life. The immense wealth that Spain had acquired from her empire did not go to the Spanish middle classes. It filled the coffers of the absolutist monarchy (perhaps the earliest of its kind in modern times) and was eventually dissipated in imperial adventures to control Europe and the peninsula. This steady drain of potential capital, of resources that might have been invested in industrial development, led to the contraction of domestic trade and the decay of the Spanish bourgeoisie.

Marx, who understood Spain better than many of his Spanish disciples, notes that as commerce and industry declined and as the early bourgeois towns began to stagnate, “internal exchanges became rare, the mingling of different provinces less frequent, and the great roads gradually deserted.” This sweeping economic decline in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries greatly strengthened the local life of the pueblos and regions. Spain and the Spanish state began to acquire ineffable qualities. Although the monarchy had all the trappings of absolutism, its control over the country was often nominal or nonexistent. Spain could be defined with geographic exactitude on a map in periods of peace, but an invader soon found, much to his chagrin, that it dissolved into many Spains in times of war. Marx shrewdly observes that Napoleon, who regarded Spain “as an inanimate corpse,” was astonished to find “that when the Spanish State was dead, Spanish society was full of life, and every part of it overflowing with powers of resistance.”

The fueros, which this unique development fostered, helped to provide a sturdiness to the pueblo that no amount of bureaucratic structuring could possibly match. They also generated those centrifugal forces that continually threatened the central power, or at least challenged the validity of its functions. What need had Spaniards for a distant, bureaucratic, anonymous state when their pueblos, human in scale, intimate in cohesion, with a comforting solidarity and spirit of mutual aid, could meet most of their social and material needs? What need was there for a remote political entity, for vague legal generalities, when the fueros provided Spaniards with highly democratic guidelines for social management? Spaniards graded their allegiances from below to above, from pueblo to locality, from locality to region, and from region to province, reserving the least loyalty, if any still remained, for the centralized state in Madrid. This intense feeling for community, for the human scale, for selfmanagement, made the Spaniard highly susceptible to libertarian ideas and methods. Transported into an urban environment, this propensity for localism turned the city into a composite of pueblos, the trade union into a patria chica, the factory into a community.