Peasant Anarchism

To claim as some writers have done that Anarchism was imported into Andalusia and the Levant would not be entirely true. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that Anarchism was latent there, and the Internationalists evoked it. If the Anarchists of the cities had to build their own countersociety to an inhospitable and corrosive commercial world, the Anarchists of the countryside found one in their very midst. They had only to reshape some of its elements in order to create a living social milieu for libertarian ideas and ways of life.[10]

The International had no difficulty in winning over the braceros, the great mass of exploited gang workers who cultivated the latifundia of the Guadalquivir basin. But the real strength lay in the mountain pueblos, of Andalusia and the Levant—the “people of the sierra,” as J. A. Pitt-Rivers calls them. Here, where a few hundred families lived in compact towns surrounded by bare, jagged peaks, Anarchism struck its deepest and most lasting roots. Tenacity and continuity are among the most striking features of these communities and reveal themselves in many ways. The squat buildings of whitewashed granite boulders and uncut stone, so common in the mountains, are made to last, and village traditions often reach back for centuries of embattled Spanish history. The beginnings of some of these pueblos can be traced back to the Moorish invasions.

In contrast to the rich Guadalquivir basin, the soil of the sierras is poor and marginal. Fighting an intractable land, the mountain peasants must coax out a mixed crop of vegetables and maize—this by hand labor, for machinery is not only costly but almost useless on the sloping, rocky soil. Olives, fruit, and stock-raising play a key role in the agricultural economy. Most of the mountain peasants own their own land, generally in plots of less than five acres. To compensate for the small size of these holdings, grazing is done on common land. A large pueblo of three thousand inhabitants or more, for instance, may own thousands of acres of forest and pasture. A substantial minority, of peasants have larger holdings (in excess of five acres). Still another minority are essentially landless laborers who must contract for work in the pueblo or on large estates in the valley. The pueblo’s money is acquired mainly by selling fattened pigs for slaughter, but eggs, poultry, and a large part of the crop also find their way to the market.

Taken as a whole, the mountain pueblo is remarkably self-sufficient economically and almost wondrously self-contained culturally. The essential means of life—food, shelter, fuel, and in times past, clothing—come from within the pueblo itself; with the result that the mountain peasants are less vulnerable to economic vicissitudes than the braceros and industrial workers. The biggest problem they face is drought. In the arid lands of the south, rainfall and access to water are as close as one can come to an agricultural “mystique.” In other respects, mountain peasants have no love of nature, no mystical attitude toward the soil, no feeling for agriculture.

Their deepest passion is social life: the joys of talk, argument, and companionship. Hence, houses cluster together, even if this means that peasants may have to walk long distances to their holdings. The virtues that are prized most highly are mutual aid, hospitality, loyalty, and honesty in dealings. So strong is this social cohesiveness that the pueblo answers for each of its members as a single community, and each in turn tends to value the good name of the pueblo over his or her own petty interests and concerns. Lope de Vega’s play Fuenteovejuna is based on the real story of a pueblo of the fifteenth century that rose against a tyrannical knight and killed him. When the royal judges arrived and tried to determine who was responsible for his death, the only answer they could get was “Fuenteovejuna.” It was inconceivable that responsibility for an act by one of its members, which had the approval of the pueblo, should be regarded as anything but an act by the pueblo as a whole.

This solidarity, reinforced by a harsh environment of sparse means and a common destiny of hard work, produces a fierce egalitarianism. The preferred form of transaction between peasants and laborers is aperceria, or partnership, rather than wages. Although they own the land and work as hard as the laborers, the peasants may give as much as half the crop to their temporary “partners.” This type of relationship is preferred not only because it is wiser to share what one has in hand rather than to speculate on monetary returns, but also owing to a rich sense of fraternity and a disdain for possessive values. In the life of the pueblo, poverty confers absolutely no inferiority; wealth, unless it is spent in behalf of the community, confers absolutely no prestige. The rich who own property in or near the pueblo are generally regarded as a wicked breed whose power and ambitions corrupt society. Not only is the pueblo immune to their influence, but in reaction, tends to organize its values around the dignity of work and the importance of moral and spiritual goals.

Before the 1870s the more energetic of these peasants might have turned to brigandage in their youth. The mountains were infested with bandits whose exploits as champions of the poor acquired, in some cases, larger-than-life proportions. But after the 1870s, the more capable of the mountain villagers became “los que tertian ideas” (“those who had ideas”). They embraced Anarchism with a devotion that was to survive every persecution but the meticulous execution squads of the fascist Falange.

To be an Anarchist in the mountain pueblos involved adopting all the personal standards of the Anarchists in the cities. A man did not smoke, drink, or go to prostitutes, but lived a sober, exemplary life in a stable free union with a compañera. The church and state were anathema, to be shunned completely. Children were to be raised and educated by libertarian standards and dealt with respectfully as sovereign human beings.

But there were also marked differences between the Anarchism of the industrial cities and the Anarchism of the countryside. As proletarian Anarchism drifted increasingly toward syndicalism, it gave a strong emphasis to organizational expediency. Peasant Anarchism retained its intertsely moral elements, often conflicting with the values and demands of the cities. As Pitt-Rivers observes, “the telegrams to the-congress of 1882 which came from Catalonia and the north ring with phrases like ‘anarco-sindicalistas.’ Those from the sierra talk only of justice and the cause of the people.” Such differences were to reemerge in every major dispute that divided the Spanish Anarchists. City and country were to conflict on the merits of national over local organization, on the value of libertarian communism as against Bakunin’s collectivism, on agrarian communes versus the division of the land into individual holdings (the reparto). But these disputes belong to later years, when peasant Anarchism began to give way to Anarchosyndicalism.

Living in a world that demanded fewer of the compromises facing their urban comrades, the Anarchists of the sierra walked like unblemished prophets among their people. Their ascendancy was based on no authority or social position. As targets of the clergy, Civil Guard, and large landowners, the Anarchists of the sierra could command no resources other than a respect earned by the exemplary nature of their behavior and the relevancy of their ideas. Lacking any formal influence, they were utterly vulnerable. The Civil Guard often made its own law in the rural hinterland of Spain. That the village Anarchists could survive the mobilized institutions of the state and church is compelling evidence of the popular support they acquired.

True, they were semi-educated men, and their ideas often seem crude to the more literate and sophisticated mind. But it is easy to forget that during the late nineteenth century in Spain, the village Anarchists were virtually the sole voices of science and modernism in the sierra. Only from the Anarchists could the peasants hope to learn of such men as Darwin, Helmholtz, Laplace—or, for that matter; Galileo and Copernicus. Always ready to expound upon their views, they formed the center of all discussions on religion, politics, science, morality, and education. Many children in the pueblos acquired the rudiments of reading and writing from these conscientious “apostles of the Idea.” And they were the only voices of protest against injustices by the local notables, bringing the complaints of the villagers to the outside world in the form of letters and articles to the Anarchist press. The people of the sierra, in turn, consulted them endlessly on all the petty details of village life. They were the arbiters of personal disputes and of malfeasances perpetrated by one villager on another— the source of advice on endless practical questions.

The majority of villagers, to be sure, were never actively occupied with.the Anarchist movement. Although aroused to action in periods of distress or hope, in ordinary times they went about their daily business with very little interest in anarchistic tenets. On the other hand, the convinced Anarchist militants formed a tight nucleus within the larger arena of the pueblo. They became, in effect, a clan, even “intermarrying” and establishing blood ties. E.J. Hobsbawm, who made a close study of the Casas Viejas uprising, found that Maria (“La Liberteria”), the daughter of Curro Cruz, the old Anarchist militant who sparked the uprising, was “engaged” to Jose Cabanas Silva, the most outstanding of the younger militants. Another member of the Silva family was the secretary of the Laborers’s union. The Cruz and Silva families were united not only by the relationship of Maria and Jose, but by the tragedy of the uprising itself.

In the valleys, and at lower elevations in the basin of the Guadalquivir, the smaller farms of the mountain peasants give way to large estates and finally to the latifundia, the great plantations that characterize the Andalusian countryside. It is here that one encounters the most glaring extremes of rural wealth and poverty, of extravagant opulence and chronic hunger. And it is here too, among the landless, rural proletarians—the braceros—that Anarchism found another kind of mass support, as shifting and changeable as the volatile moods of the Andalusian poor.

If the tenacity of the Anarchist movement in the sierra can be explained by the solidity of the pueblo, the instability of this movement on the latifundia can be explained by the poverty of social forms among the braceros. Brought together and then scattered by the seasonal demands of plantation agriculture, these great masses of rural laborers lacked any definable social outlines or institutions. They did not live on the landlord’s estate like serfs, or in villages like peasants, or even in large cities as did the industrial workers, but rather in the slums of dismal Andalusian towns of 15,000 inhabitants or more. These towns were too large and formless to provide the solidarity of a sierra pueblo and too small to afford the stimulation of a Barcelona.

Drab and purposeless, the lives of the braceros were completely unstable. Hired by the season, the week, or the day (they were, in fact, commonly called jomaleros, or day laborers), they worked, with occasional smoking breaks, for twelve or more hours daily at considerable distances from home. During the plowing and harvesting seasons, when several months of continuous work could be guaranteed, the bracero would be expected to leave his family and live in the landlord’s ganania, a shabby, barn-like barracks, where his bed was some straw on the floor and his companions were lonely, miserable wretches like himself, torn from their home and families by the need to work.

Their misery beggars description. The landlord fed them gazpacho, a soup of water, oil, vinegar, bread, and some beans or chick peas. Bread, eaten as a substitute for virtually all the alimentary staples, formed the basic diet of the Andalusian poor. A landlord who added other ingredients to this impoverishing and stunting diet could be expected to deduct his additional costs from the bracero’s wages. The inhuman neglect these people suffered as late as the 1930s is conveyed in an account by E.H.G. Dobby, an English geographer who spent two years engaged in fieldwork in Spain:

I recall an incident during a visit to an experimental pig farm in an out-of-the-way part of Andalusia. From the darkness at one end of the building came a red glow. I went along and found a laborer’s family crouched on the floor around a twig fire with smoke so thick that breathing was difficult. The malodorous squalor contrasted with the carefully washed sties that I had been seeing. To my query an old woman mumbled: “Yes, we live here. Worse than the pigs.” At which the owner beside me exclaimed indignantly: “You have a roof over your head. What more do you want?”

The response of the oymer sums up, with priceless clarity, the attitude of the Andalusian landed classes toward the braceros: they were regarded as less than animals. And to form a complete picture of life in the gananias during sowing or harvesting time, one must add to this description twenty or more people of all ages. If a family was present, every member worked, including the children, often to the point of sheer exhaustion.

Economically, the impoverished braceros were at the mercy of the landlord, who could lower their wages and break their strikes by hiring scab labor from the mountain villages or by simply cultivating the best land and letting the rest lie fallow. Indeed, large tracts of land were not placed under cultivation: some were returned to game for hunting, others to pasture for breeding fighting bulls. Owing to their extreme poverty, the braceros could rarely conduct long attritive strikes; hence the violent, near-insurrectionary dimensions of labor conflicts in Andalusia. Indeed, the strikes had virtually no staying power without support from peasants who owned or leased land in the latifundia regions. If the landowners were not panicked into concessions by the fear of a widespread jacquerie or peasant war, the strikers usually lost out. Occasionally, public opinion shifted to their side and the less inhumane landowners made concessions on their own.

To starving, landless proletarians who worked a half year or less for a pittance, the sight of large areas of untilled land could generate only one kind of feeling: a searing hatred for the landlord ancl the stewards who executed his orders. Their antagonism might have been contained in 1835, when Mendizabal and his Liberal ministry initiated the confiscation of the church lands. In the following years, immense tracts of ecclesiastical and common land were put up for sale in Andalusia. As noted earlier, this enormous legacy was snatched up by the bourgeoisie and turned, for the most part, into latifundia. The braceros acquired nothing. Agrarian unrest was answered not by land reform but by the use of the Civil Guard—the detested Guardia—against the peasantry and landless laborers.

Historically, the role of this special police force in promoting revolutionary unrest in the countryside has been so important that it must be discussed as a distinct factor in the development of peasant Anarchism. An elite constabulary, carefully selected and well-disciplined, the Civil Guard was established in 1844 to deal with the growing banditry in the south. By this time, the great bulk of Andalusian bandits no longer even remotely approximated the heroic image they had acquired in popular legend. They had become the tools of the caciques. They were used to defend property against the upsurge of peasant unrest and intimidate the opponents of their corrupt political bosses in local elections. The alliance between the caciques and bandits served not to abate brigandage, but to expand it. Shielded from imprisonment by the patronage of their new employers, the bandits began to raid with impunity. A point was finally reached where travel between Andalusian towns was virtually impossible without an armed escort.

To restore the security of the roads by using the local militia and police would have been useless. Like the bandits, they too had been largely taken over by the caciques. Thus, when the Civil Guard was formed, strict measures had to be taken to insulate the new force from local influence. Its men were never recruited from the districts in which they served, and they were expressly forbidden to intermarry or establish familiar relations with the local population. Civil Guards occupied special fortified barrracks within the village. They invariably walked in pairs, fully armed, and exuded a mistrust toward the community that soon enveloped them in hostility. A force apart, increasingly detested, the Guardia became easily unnerved and trigger-happy, escalating minor protests into riots and riots into insurrections. Whatever support the revolutionary groups could not mobilize with their literature and oratory, the Guardia eventually gained for them with its carbines. Narvaez, who organized this force and sent it on its way into the countryside, deserves to be enshrined as one of the ablest propagandists of the Anarchist and Socialist movements in Spain.

Frustrated by the disposition of the church lands, prodded by the carbines of the Guardia, and threatened by the values of a crassly egoistic business civilization, the peasantry and braceros of the south were to create their own unique form of social revolt. By the late 1860s, a new kind of restlessness began to stir the pueblos, gananias, and drab towns of the south: a sense of mounting exaltation that was to surge up at various points, suddenly enveloping the rural masses in hope and sweeping them into local insurrections. Often they occurred not merely for narrow economic gains, but to achieve comunismo libertario: the libertarian communism described in Anarchist pamphlets. Writers on the Andalusian uprisings—including the Anarchists themselves—tend to emphasize the millenarian quality of these outbursts; and it is true that in the naive and simple directness of their visions, the insurgent peasants and braceros of Andalusia seemed to parallel the rural folk of the late middle ages with their enraptured dreams of a “second coming.” Evil and wickedness would be banished from the earth. Rich and poor, enlightened by the bright reality of a new world, would embrace in a spirit of reconciliation and mutual aid. It would be an ascetic world—“a just sharing of austerity rather than a dream of riches,” as Hobsbawm notes—but peace, freedom, and equality would reign. Not only would money, wealth, and differences in social rank disappear, but to the more austere adherents, people would cease to partake of tobacco, alcohol, coffee, and other “vice-promoting” luxuries.

This vision would percolate in the gananias of the latifundia and the mountain pueblos, .gradually building up until it seemed that nothing was worth discussing but its merits and possibilities. Then it would boil up, precipitated by a strike or a stupid act by the authorities. There would be a brief period of fighting, followed by a period of repression in which the dream would seem to evaporate. Elation and hope would be succeeded by sullen despair and fatalism. Ricardo Mella, the sensitive Anarchist essayist who lived in Andalusia for many years, recalls the volatile temperament of the people, so quick to rise in boundless enthusiasm and then sink into dejection, lacking doggedness and staying power. Later, however, passions would begin to surge up again, and the dream would reappear. The cycle would be repeated with the same fervor, as though a regeneration had occurred without a background of past defeats.

But granting the cycles of periodic uprising and decline, the agrarian movement in the south had a solid economic core that accounts for its continual revival in the face of unfavorable odds. For many peasants and braceros, comunismo libertario was equated with the reparto—the redivision of the land. In Andalusia, where a vast acreage was needlessly left uncultivated or used with gross inefficiency, a rational redivision of the land would have raised the standard of living enormously and provided a powerful spur to Spain’s economic development. In the 1870s and early 1880s, the reparto meant the division of the land into individual holdings, not collective farms. Even the peasant Anarchists adhered to this view. Later, with the growth of Anarchosyndicalist unions, the braceros and, to a lesser degree, the peasants were won over to a communal system of land tenure.

What doomed the agrarian movement of the period was not the impracticability of its visions but its isolation. The upsurges were usually limited to a few localities, each following the other like firecrackers on a string. Rarely was there an explosion throughout the entire region. The pueblos had yet to be linked with the gananias. Periodicals were needed to bring tidings of the social movement in one district to the attention of others. Organization was necessary to coordinate the insurrections into a common movement. Finally, and most importantly of all, the barriers separating the industrial cities from the countryside had to be demolished and the workers’ movement joined with that of the peasants.

Agrarian Unions and Uprisings

Andalusians such as Trinidad Soriano, Jose Garcia Vinas, and Antonio Gonzalez Meneses were active in establishing the Barcelona nucleus of the International and participated in the founding congress of the Spanish Federation in June 1870. They were students of technology, medicine, and engineering, residents of the Catalan seaport who had gathered around Farga Pellicer in the early days of Internationalist activity and were later to return to their homes in the south where most of them functioned as Anarchist propagandists. In addition, La Federacion had begun to reach a number of Andalusian cities, where it had a limited circulation among extreme left-wing Federalists, the more “socialistic” followers of Proudhon and Pi y Margall. Throughout 1870, however, the real strength of the Spanish Federation lay in the north, particularly in Barcelona and nearby textile towns. All seductive preconceptions aside, the fact is that Spanish Anarchism first developed among urban industrial workers and craftsmen, not millenarian peasants. Dreaming millenarians and saintly apostles can, of course, be found but Spanish Anarchism’s earliest intellectual adherents contained a fair proportion of technicians and scientists.

In 1871, the Spanish Eederation began to-make serious headway in the cities of the south, and thereafter it grew rapidly. A year later, Anselmo Lorenzo, touring Andalusia, could report with great satisfaction that viable groups existed in Seville, Carmona, Jerez, Malaga, and Cadiz. The Federation could also claim small groups in Cordoba, Aguilar de la Frontera, and other communities. In the years to come, these towns were to play a key role in the spread of Anarchist ideas among the braceros and peasants of the south. By the end of 1872, the Federation could claim close to 28,000 members in Andalusia, more than half its national following.

Andalusia would have provided a fertile ground for the growth of Afiarchist ideas even in the absence of any Socialist or Federalist precursors. By the 1860s, the south of Spain was slipping into a condition of chronic social upheaval. The sale of the church properties and particularly of the entailed lands (the latter, mostly held communally by the villages and municipalities) had upset the traditional equilibrium between the ruling classes and the oppressed of the region. For generations the walled, white-washed cortijo of the landlord and his overseers had dominated the latifundium like a self-contained fortress of privilege and exploitation. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a relationship still obtained in which the arrogance of the wealthy was pitted against the fatalism of the hungry and impoverished.

It would have been bad enough if the expropriations of the church properties, after opening the prospect of a reparto, had cheated the peasants and braceros of their last hope to acquire land by legal means. The sale of the confiscated lands, however, not only severed the last ties between the landless and the state; it strengthened the power of a grasping bourgeoisie which lacked even the tempering aristocratic pretensions and paternalism of the traditional nobility. In the large cities, wealthy middle-class families became absentee landlords, owners of immense latifundia. In the rural communities, many local bourgeois (a class of usurers, produce dealers, bailiffs, and lawyers) acquired smaller but substantial properties of their own. From this latter stratum came the caciques of Andalusia—the men who made a mockery of every election in the countryside. In their abrasive exploitation and relentless pursuit of profit, this rural bourgeoisie helped stoke a rebellion that could find relief only in the uprooting of the entire structure of Andalusian society.

The decay of traditional relations in Andalusia affected not only the peasantry and braceros, but also the lower petty bourgeoisie of the provincial towns and cities. This large class of school teachers, civil servants, journalists, professionals, and shopkeepers lived in a genteel poverty that mingled insecurity with humiliation. By the midnineteenth century, the advance of capitalism into the south had stripped their vocations of all social prestige. They too, reduced increasingly to a reservoir of exploitable labor, began to suffer from the general exploitation of the area. The superficial unity that Liberalism had created among all the middle classes during the early part of the century began to give way to a polarization of prosperous and impoverished classes, driving the petty bourgeoisie—particularly its intellectual stratum—into extreme Federalist and even vaguely Socialist groupings.

Andalusia, it should be noted, is not lacking in a Socialist tradition of its own. Even before Fernando Garrido in Madrid had founded La Atraccion (generally described as the first Spanish Socialist—actually Fourierist—periodical), Juan Abreu had been propagating similar ideas in Cadiz. Later, he established a Fourierist colony near Jerez de la Frontera, but it was suppressed by the authorities. The expansion of a militant Federalist movement into the south had created a great interest in Socialist ideas, which was fed by pamphlets on Proudhon’s mutualist notions and by translations of his writings. A strong tradition of exaltado Republicanism from the 1820s provided a certain muscularity to these ideas by emphasizing the bitter’ antagonism between the rich and poor, the owners of property and the dispossessed.

This muscularity represents one of the most striking features of the radical movement in the south. It would be no exaggeration to say that, during the 1850s and 1860s, the radical petty bourgeoisie of Andalusia had developed into one of the most insurrectionary strata in Europe. Only the Parisians could have matched the reckless propensity of the Andalusians to take up arms, build barricades, and do battle, often against hopeless odds. Major uprisings broke out in southern cities in 1857, in 1861, and again in 1873. The first of these, led by the veterinarian Perez del Alamo in Loja, has earned a place in the annals of Spanish revolutionary history as an insurreccion socialista. By the early 1870s the social terrain of the entire region had been thoroughly prepared to receive the most advanced.ideas emanating from Madrid and Barcelona. It could be said, in fact, that Anarchism represented not the seed of a new social theory, which found a congenial soil in Andalusia, but the fruition of a great revolutionary development in ideas and social conditons that had been initiated decades earlier.

In some respects, this cumulative development accounts for the slow growth of the Spanish Federation in the southern cities during 1870 and 1871. The Federalist movement almost completely occupied the energies of the Andalusian revolutionaries, leaving little room as yet for the expansion of the International. Inquiries about the International had been received from Montilla, for example, as early as April 1871, but as Diaz del Moral tells us, municipal political conflicts so engrossed the radical movement of the Andalusian city that a viable section could not be formed until nearly two years later. Owing to the work of Diaz del Moral, however, we can form a fairly clear picture of how the earliest Andalusian sections were established and the kind of people they attracted.

One of the most complete accounts of these beginnings can be given for the city of Cordoba. The earliest evidence of Internationalist activity appeared in the summer of 1871, when Rafael Suarez and the newspaperman Jose Navarro Prieto began to correspond with the Federal Council in Madrid. Later, they were joined by three others: the craftsman Francisco Barrado Garcia; a professor of canonical law, Augustin Cervantes, and a municipal employee, Eugenio Gonzalez. This curious assortment of vocations was not unusual in radical groups in the south. All five men were initiated into the Bakuninist Alliance and, by 1872, had established a “section of various trades” and later a local federation in Cordoba. Diaz del Moral leaves us a colorful description of the two intellectuals in the group, Navarro and Cervantes. Their contrasting personalities provide a fascinating picture of the varied human types who were drawn to Anarchism at that period.

Jose Navarro Prieto had barely reached nineteen years of age when he began his correspondence with the Federal Council. As was the case with so many young Andalusian radicals of the day, in his background we see an overlapping of the worlds of craftsman and middle-class intellectual. There was the father, a shoemaker who demanded a higher station in life for his only son; the university education, acquired at great parental sacrifice; the prospect of stagnating as a schoolteacher or a lawyer. Navarro, however, was much too restless and hedonistic to sacrifice his youth to an academic routine. The prospect of a niggardly professional life must have appalled him. He turned to journalism and began to develop a local reputation as a biting satirist. His wit and mental agility soon made him into one of the most outstanding Internationalists in the south, and by 1872 he enjoyed the confidence of the Aliancistas in Madrid and Barcelona.

But apparently he also enjoyed a reputation for cowardice in the face of physical danger. The defeat of the Federalist movement in 1873 and the prospect of repression under Serrano began to raise political doubts in his mind which carried him steadily toward the parties of “order.” Navarro soon became a complete conservative. In later years, he more than fulfilled his father’s aspirations by becoming a leading newspaper publisher and editor. After his death, he was remembered fondly by his conservative friends as an ingenious prankster, a jovial and agreeable character who, in Diaz del Moral’s words was “more dedicated to Dionysus than to Apollo.”

Navarro’s amiable, fun-loving personality was very common in the south, contradicting the stereotype of the mystical Andalusian Anarchist, and many men with his youthful zest and tastes entered the International. Andalusia also had its share of sober figures like Augustin Cervantes, made of more spiritual stuff than Navarro and able to withstand persecution with greater fortitude. The son of a Murcian lawyer, Don Augustin Cervantes del Castillo Valero attended the University of Madrid and finally acquired a doctorate, with degrees in law, philosophy, and letters. He was a serious student, a taciturn young man who presented a reserved and withdrawn mien. This imposing demeanor, coupled with great learning and a varied cultural background, carried Cervantes into the upper strata of the academic world. By the age of thirty he was already a professor in the University of Cordoba. His marriage two years later to Dona Julia Valdivia y Ruiz de Valenzuela brought him into the highest society of the city.

Yet there was a passionate feeling for humanity in Don Augustin that manifested itself in visits to the poorer quarters of the city, where he gave money to the needy. The Cordobese notables knew nothing about these visits. A few months after his marriage, Cervantes openly espoused the cause of the International, and his peers were stunned. He published a propagandistic work. Three Socialist Discourses on Property and Inheritance, and participated in the Cordoba congress of the International as a delegate of the local federation of Solana. A social vacuum began to envelop Cervantes. His bourgeois friends—including Republicans—began to withdraw from him, and he soon found himself almost entirely in the company of the Internationalists. Finally, when he criticized Catholicism from his academic chair, he was savagely attacked by official society. Finding it intolerable to stay at the university, Cervantes left Cordoba to take up an exchange professorship in Badajoz, where he died shortly afterwards.

Although their destinies were to differ, Navarro and Cervantes were men of ability; more significantly, they were surrounded by a complement of highly dedicated working-class elements. The Cordoba nucleus began to prosper. After June 1872, it increased to fifty-four members and established itself among the shoe and hat workers of the city. At the Cordoba congress in December, the section played host to leading Internationalists from all over Spain and its members began to acquire a degree of national prominence. The declaration of a republic two months later gave tremendous impetus to the group. It led a successful strike of weavers, established a progressive school, and by June, managed to publish a newspaper of its own, El Orden. Riding on the Federalist groundswell of the late spring, the Cordobese Internationalists elected their own candidate, the Aliancista Barrado, to the municipal council without any demonstrable qualms over an Anarchist occupying a seat in a bourgeois legislative body.

The agitation during these months was spectacular. Internationalist and Federalist propaganda rolled from the presses. The upheaval spread from the city to the countryside, breaking out in incendiarism. There were rumors of an impending Federalist and Internationalist revolt. Paramilitary groups were formed by Federalists and Monarchists, each threatening to take over the city, which was a strategic southern railroad hub. Anticipating a rising, the military governor, General Ripoll, arrested suspects from both groups. Later General Pavia and his troops took over Cordoba. The Republican militia was disarmed, with the result that the city never rose in the Cantonalist insurrections of July 1873. Their enthusiasm waning, the Federalists suspended the publication of their newspapers and began to make themselves scarce. It was around this time that Navarro began to defect from the workers’ movement and drift toward the governmental party. Even the worthy Don Augustin prudently withdrew from Internationalist activity. Led by the craftsman Barrado, the Cordobese section now consisted exclusively of workers. Yet, despite the mounting repression and the desertion of the intellectuals, it continued to grow; El Orden, for instance, reached its maximum circulation during the late summer of 1873.

With the accession of Castelar to the presidency, however, a crackdown began in earnest. Constitutional guarantees were suspended, strikers were threatened with gunfire if they refused to return to work, the centros obreros were closed down, and the most militant Internationalists found themselves in jail. On October 1, 1873, Barrado was arrested and later deported to Alicante. The Cordoba section now began to decline rapidly. Under Serrano’s harsh dictatorship, which replaced the Castelar regime in January 1874, the entire Spanish Federation was forced underground. By April, after weeks of harsh persecution, the Cordobese section disappeared completely as an organized group. The hopes it had engendered throughout the spring and summer of 1873 were to be nursed for years by a handful of isolated, scattered individuals. Not until 1881, when a resurgence of radical activity swept Spain, was the movement to revive in an organized form.

The Cordobese section gives us a fairly typical picture of the development followed by the early Anarchist movement in the Andalusian cities. Intellectuals play the initiating role in establishing a nucleus, but they are soon surrounded by workers, usually craftsmen, who form the lasting bedrock of the local organization. The movement in the cities is not millenarian or wildly apocalyptic. On the contrary, it takes root in a suprisingly stolid manner and grows rapidly only under the impetus of events. When the situation becomes too risky, the majority of intellectuals drop away or undergo a “modification” of their faith that leaves the group in the hands of its working-class adherents. From that point on, the Anarchist movement becomes a predominantly proletarian (or peasant) organization. Its outstanding militants are recruited from the shops and factories.

It is interesting to note how closely the development of the Cordobese section was paralleled by the International in Seville, another major center of Andalusian Anarchism. Here too, a leading role in establishing an organizing nucleus was played by two intellectuals. Trinidad Soriano had by this time returned to his home in Seville and was playing a key role in establishing a movement in the city. Then there was Nicolas Alonso Marselau, a left-wing Republican who had come to Anarchism at the end of the 1860s. He established La Razon, the first Internationalist newspaper in the city and one of the earliest in Andalusia. Marselau had been a theology student, and his background was very similar to that of Cervantes. His participation in any major decision of the local group was considered so important that, when Lorenzo visited the city to establish the “Defenders of the International,” the Aliancistas trooped to the Seville jail where Marselau was confined and conferred with him there. But the onset of blindness and the upheavals of the 1870s shattered all his left-wing convictions. He renounced Anarchism to become a Trappist monk. The movement he helped to create was destroyed by Pavia and Serrano. When it revived, its nucleus and supporters were mainly proletarian. There was, for instance, the cobbler Sanchez Rosa, who had only two years of formal education. After an embattled youth, in which he participated in the famous Jerez uprising and suffered imprisonment, Rosa became an outstanding Anarchist propagandist and educator. He founded progressive and libertarian schools and acquired a certain renown for his simple moral dialogues on the virtues of anarchy and the evils of capitalism.

In the end, Serrano and his successor Canovas were not to prevail in their attempts to repress the Anarchist movement. The crushing of the Cantonalist insurrections were to turn many Federalists into active libertarians. The prestige that the International acquired among the ordinary workers was enormous. Later, with the revival of radical activity, they were to enter its successor organizations in greater numbers than before. No less important is the effect the Federalist movement and insurrections had in disseminating radical ideas among the peasants and braceros. The shock waves of Federalist activity and the Cantonalist barricades radiated outward from the cities of Andalusia into the countryside. The rural poor, emulating the revolutionaries in the cities, set fire to the landlord’s crops and haylofts, killed his watch dogs, injured his cattle, and tried to destroy some of the cortijos. Wandering Anarchist propagandists, many of them refugees or deportees from “urban repression, appeared in the pueblos and gananias, and their role in spreading Anarchist ideas can hardly by overestimated. Years after Serrano suppressed the International in the cities, Anarchist ideas were to percolate deeply into the Andalusian countryside.

The Spanish Federation, however, was now in hopeless decline. Its history between 1874 and 1880 is a humiliating one. The Federal Commission, continually in flight from the police, clawed itself to shreds with internal bickering. A quarrelsome, unstable body with a waning following and obscure leaders, it had finally lost the respect of its small rank and file. Elections to the Commission were treated as a joke, an occasion for a good deal of malicious humor. The once-feared Spanish Federation simply faded away. When the revival of the 1880s came, the Federation was no longer to be seen in the major cities of Spain.

The Federation’s sister organizations north of the Pyrenees also declined. The Bakuninist International, founded at St. Imier, held its last congress in 1877 in the Belgian industrial town of Verviers. This libertarian organization had lasted only five years. Its decline is usually atributed to the destruction of the craft industry in the Jura, the famous Swiss watchmakers among whom the Bakuninists had acquired so much support in the previous decade, but this explanation is only partly true. Perhaps a more important reason for the decline of the libertarian International and the Anarchist movement generally in Europe was the economic stabilization that began in the mid-1870s, an upswing that fostered conservative attitudes in the working class. The Marxists, with their policy of electoral activity, parlimentarianism, and reformist unions, were to reap the rewards of the period and win the bulk of the workers outside of Spain and France.

It was not merely police repression that destroyed the International in Spain, but also tactics nurtured by its isolation. In the autumn of 1878 Juan Olivia Moncasi, a young Internationalist from Tarragona, tried to assassinate Alfonso XII by firing two shots at the king in the Calle Mayor in Madrid. The attempt failed, but the government used the occasion to heighten its repressive measures against the labor movement as a whole. Many union militants as well as Anarchists were arrested. The Catalan workers responded with retaliatory strikes and the peasants in Andalusia with a wave of incendiarism. The Spanish Federation’s commitment to terrorism and the reprisals provoked by the assassination attempt exacerbated the poor relationship between the Federal Commission and the working class. The greatest strain existed in Catalonia, where the International had its largest proletarian following. When the moderately Liberal government of Sagasta replaced the Canovas ministry in February 1881, the sentiment of the Catalan workers veered sharply away from the violent policies of the Federal Commission.

An attempt was now made to establish a more conventional type of labor federation, avowedly Anarchist in theory but essentially opportunistic in practice. The founding congress of the Workers’ Federation of the Spanish Region, as the new organization was called, convened in the memorable Teatro del Circo of Barcelona on September 24, 1881. One hundred and forty delegates representing 162 federations through Spain answered the call—a remarkably large response if one considers that the labor movement had just emerged from years of severe repression. Although more than a decade of rich experiences separated the two founding congresses at the Teatro, the proceedings seem almost like a replay of the disputes that had occurred in 1870. Republicans tried to gain a commitment to political action. Predictably, some of the more forthright trade unionists sought a conventional labor organization, explicitly aimed at reforms and economic gains. The congress rejected both of these positions by large votes, declaring Anarchism to be the social goal of the Spanish working class. It emphatically rejected political tactics as means for achieving its aims. Organizationally, the Workers’ Federation modeled itself on the decentralized structure of the old Spanish Federation, but there were modifications in the local unions (uniones de oficios smiles) which closely resembled the forms that were to be adopted later by the CNT.

The vote accepting Anarchism as an ideal was overwhelming—110 to 8—but the rhetoric could barely conceal a basic shift toward conventional, indeed moderate, unionism. Over strong opposition by the more militant Anarchists, the new Workers’ Federation decided as a matter of policy to accumulate a strike fund. It also decided to limit rigorously the. use of the strike as a weapon. A strike, when unavoidable, was to be orderly and well-disciplined. It was to rely on attrition rather than compulsion to gain its ends. Essentially, this meant an end to labor violence and sabotage—in short, to militant, quasi-insurrectionary strikes.

This approach marked a decisive defeat for the serious Anarchists in the union. That the more conventional Catalan union leaders could prevail was due in part to the disunity and ideological confusion among the delegates who called themselves Anarchists. The old Bakuninist Alliance of Social Democracy, which played so decisive a role in orienting the Spanish Federation, had gone down together with the International. By the 1880s there was no national Anarchist movement in Spain. Instead there was a quarreling multitude of Anarchist groups whose ideas ranged so far afield that at one extreme they were little more than Republicans and at the other, embattled, individualistic terrorists. There were also many outright reformists who called themselves “Anarchists” because of the prestige and romantic aura that had begun to surround the word among the workers.

Another factor that accounts for the shift toward a policy of conventional unionism was the reprisals that had followed the militant policies of the International. Although already touched upon, this factor needs further explanation. The Catalan unionists viewed the Sagasta regime with extreme suspicion. The new prime minister, a notorious foe of the labor movement, had patched together an uneasy coalition of moderate Liberal groups in order to come to power. The unionists had every reason to fear that he had restored the legality of the trade unions as a kind of democratic window-dressing for the new ministry. However, the Catalan labor leaders were clearly intent on preserving this facade by avoiding any sharp confrontation with the new regime. Despite their revolutionary rhetoric, they dealt prudently with the Sagasta ministry. One of their manifestoes reads more like an appeal for restraint than a call to action; indeed, virtually any advocate of militant tactics is described as a provocateur.

As it turned out, the mere growth of the union was enough to doom it. By the time of its second congress, held in Seville in late September 1882, the Workers’ Federation claimed a following of nearly 58,000 members organized into 218 local federations and 663 sections. The great bulk of the union’s membership—more than 38,000—was located in Andalusia, while only 13,000 came from industrial Catalonia. To many delegates from the south, the opportunistic policies of the Catalan labor leaders were nothing less than treachery. During the three-day congress a furious battle exploded between the two great regions of Spanish Anarchism. It was here, in the Seville congress, that the Workers’ Federation essentially defined Anarchism as its long-range goal and the struggle for economic improvement as its day-to-day task—the same dichotomy that had faced the congress of 1870. Although this explicit formula was presented as a compromise, the Catalan viewpoint essentially prevailed.[11]

But there was deep dissatisfaction among the Andalusians, particularly among the delegates from the southernmost comarcal of the peninsula. One group, calling itself the Desheredados (Disinherited), denounced the Federation’s policies and broke away, forming an organization of its own to engage in direct action. The Desheredados were probably one of many secret societies that were proliferating among the land laborers of the south. The late 1870s and early 1880s can be described as a period of economic expansion for the industrial north, but in Andalusia these decades were marked by severe drought and near-famine conditions. In Jerez, where the workers and land laborers had clung to Anarchism in the bleakest years of persecution, discontent ran especially high. Here, where the Desheredados had their strongest support, the vineyard workers received extremely low wages based on piecework and lived in desperate poverty.

Although there may have been more talk than actual violence among the Desheredados, the Jerez district had already experienced many acts of incendiarism and a number of assassinations. The victims of the assassinations were mostly informers for the police and occasionally landlords. It is quite possible that the Desheredados, together with other secret societies in the area, were involved in some of the murders. The twilight zone in which these groups operated makes it impossible to distinguish fact from myth.

A celebrated case of the 1880s points up both the myth-making that surrounded such incidents and the very real repression that came in their wake. In the midst of a promising strike by the vineyard laborers against piecework, a tavern keeper suspected of having been a police informer was killed. While the strike was still going on, the Civil Guard suddenly announced that its investigation of the murder had revealed the existence of an immense secret society, the Mano Negra or Black Hand, which was planning to slaughter all landlords in Andalusia. Despite recent arguments to the contrary, the sensational stories that the Guardia fed the public are, in my opinion, fictitious. The distinguished Spanish sociologist Bernaldo de Quiros, who investigated the case for the government, doubted that the Mano Negra ever existed in Andalusia. But the case was used by the police to round up Anarchists and labor militants throughout the south. Hundreds were tortured to extract confessions, although the majority were finally released for want of evidence. The aftermath of the investigation in 1883 ended in the trial of a hundred alleged conspirators and in the garroting of seven out of the fourteen who had been condemned to death. But the legend of the Mano Negra lingered on for years, and Anarchists were arrested and accused of belonging to this spurious organization well into the 1890s.

The Mano Negra persecutions destroyed the Workers’ Federation in Andalusia and almost certainly contributed to its decline in Catalonia. An atmosphere of fear, nourished by memories of the repression in the 1870s settled over Spain and workers began to desert the movement by the thousands. The third congress of the Federation, held in Valencia in 1883, sharply denounced the violent tactics attributed to the Mano Negra but this did not end the continuous decline. Only 3,000 members remained in the now-underground Andalusian sections. La Revista Social, an outstanding Anarchist theoretical magazine which had reached a circulation of 20,000, simply faded out of existence for want of subscribers. By 1887, when the Federation held its fourth congress in Madrid, only sixteen delegates showed up. Two years later, the Workers’ Federation of the Spanish Region, which had begun with such hope and promise eight years earlier, was officially dissolved.

For the peasant Anarchists of Spain the medieval village had many limitations. As a community, however, it had many vital features. The Andalusian Anarchists valued the pueblo because its spirit of mutual aid, solidarity, egalitarianism, and sociability accorded perfectly with the goal of Anarchism, indeed, of any humane society. But they saw the village as a point of departure for a still better way of life, not as an end in itself. For them it was a springboard for a society in which material needs would be satisfied by modern technology and science; the human mind would be liberated, by reason and knowledge; the human spirit nourished by cooperation and frggdom.

Accordingly, the Anarchists carried on an unrelenting war against the negative features of the pueblo—its parochialism, superstition, ignorance, and systems of authority. They encouraged a respect for culture and the boldest ideas in nearly every sphere of life. To the peasants and braceros they imparted a sense of dignity and self-worth, of generosity toward the oppressed of their own class, indeed, a view of humanity that was keenly internationalist in spirit and outlook. They brought to the pueblos a knowledge of sciences that had been forbidden by the clergy, a claim to a liberty that had been abrogated by the state, and a demand for material well-being that had been usurped by the ruling classes.

It would be interesting in this respect to compare Andalusian Anarchism with another peasant movement, the Carlism of the northern mountains. Carlism, of course, was primarily an attempt’to preserve the pueblo and its clerical-patriarchal morality from modernism. Led by the church, this movement was atavistic: if could offer no program other than a return to the past. In sharp contrast to peasant Anarchism, Carlism fostered a mindless obedience to the hierarchy of the church and the authority of the crown—at least the one it hoped to place on the head of the pretender. Provincial and dogmatic, it preached a gospel of hatred and ignorance toward scientific knowledge, experimentation, and intellectual independence. In three civil wars, the Carlist armies marched toward the Liberal cities of the north, burning railroad stations and destroying other “demoniacal” innovations. Fanatical priests, goading their flocks to savage brutalities, terrified the entire peninsula with an example of clerical reaction gone mad. Accordingly, the Carlist Wars served up some of the most frightful butcheries to be seen in the nineteenth century. From this quarter came the demand for censorship of periodicals and books, for clerical control over educational institutions, and for a restoration of the Inquisition.

Both Carlism and rural Anarchism, then, take their point of departure from the pueblo. But it would be difficult to conceive of more divergent world outlooks than those of the two peasant movements. One turned toward the past, the other toward the future. Both explored entirely antithetical potentialities in the Spanish pueblo’s dissatisfaction with bourgeois society. Their common basis in village N society is entirely secondary to the fact that they fostered contradictory possibilities and moved in opposing directions.