In late October 1868, Giuseppi Fanelli, a tall, heavily bearded Italian of about forty, arrived at Barcelona after a railroad journey from Geneva. It was Fanelli’s first visit to Spain. He had reached the city without incident and he would leave it, a few months later, ^without any interference by the Spanish authorities. There was nothing in his appearance that would have distinguished him from any other visiting Italian, except perhaps for his height and his intense prepossessing stature.

But Giuseppi Fanelli was not an ordinary visitor to Spain. His brief journey was to have a far-reaching influence, providing the catalyst for what was not only the most widespread workers’ and peasants’ movement in modern Spain, but the largest Anarchist movement in modem Europe. For Fanelli was an experienced Italian revolutionary, a supporter of the Russian Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and a highly gifted propagandist. His journey had been organized by Bakunin in order to gain Spanish adherents to the International Workingmen’s Association, the famous “First International” established by European workers a few years earlier.

Fanelli’s trip should have been a complete fiasco. Financially, it was conducted on a shoestring. Bakunin had raised barely enough money to pay for the fare, with the result that Fanelli, chronically short of funds, was constantly pressed for time. His knowledge of Spain was limited and he could speak scarcely a sentence in Spanish. In Barcelona, he managed after some difficulty to find Elie Reclus, the distinguished French anthropologist and a firm Bakuninist, who was visiting the Catalan port for journalistic reasons. Otherwise, Fanelli knew no one in the city. Apparently, the two men quarreled over Reclus’s accommodating attitude toward his Spanish Republican friends, for Fanelli, much to his host’s embarrassment, tried to win them over to Anarchism. After borrowing some money from Reclus to continue his journey, the Italian went on to Madrid where he met Jose Guisascola, the owner of the periodical La lgualdad. He put Fanelli in touch with a group of workers with “very advanced ideas” and a small, intimate meeting was arranged in the guest room of one Rubau Donadeu. Fanelli could only address them in Italian or French, and the workers, most of whom knew only Spanish, had neglected to bring along an interpreter. But once the tall, lean Italian began to speak, his rapport with the audience was so complete that all barriers of language were quickly swept away. Using a wealth of Latin gestures and tonal expressions, Fanelli managed to convey with electric effect the richness of his libertarian visions and the bitterness of his anger toward human suffering and exploitation. The workers, accustomed to the moderate expressions of Spanish liberals, were stunned. Decades later, Anselmo Lorenzo, who attended the meeting as a young man, describes the talk with a vividness of memory that time seems to have left undimmed. Fanelli’s “black expressive eyes,” he recalls, “flashed like lightning or took on the appearance of kindly compassion according to the sentiments that dominated him. His voice had a metallic tone and was susceptible to all the inflections •ppropriate to what he was saying, passing rapidly from accents of anger and menace against tyrants and exploiters to take on those of suffering, regret, and consolation, when he spoke of the pains of the exploited, either as one who yvithout suffering them himself understands them, or as one who through his altruistic feelings delights in presenting an ultra-revolutionary ideal of peace and fraternity. He spoke in French and Italian, but we could understand his expressive mimicry and follow his speech.”

Fanelli scored a complete triumph. All those present declared themselves for the International. He extended his stay in Madrid for several weeks, cultivating his newly won adherents; together they had three or four “propaganda sessions,” alternating with intimate conversations on walks and in cafes. Lorenzo recalls that he was “especially favored” with Fanelli’s confidences. If this is so, Fanelli showed excellent judgment: Anselmo Lorenzo was to live for many years, and he remained a dedicated revolutionary, earning the sobriquet “the grandfather of Spanish Anarchism.” His contribution to the spread of Anarchist ideas in Barcelona and Andalusia over the decades ahead was enormous.

On January 24, 1869, Fanelli met with his Madrid converts for the last time. Although the small group, composed mostly of printing workers, house painters, and shoemakers, numbered little more than twenty, it officially declared itself the Madrid section of the International Workingmen’s Association. Lorenzo tried to persuade Fanelli to remain longer, but he declined. The Italian explained that he had to leave because it was necessary for individuals and groups to develop “by their own efforts, with their own values,” so that the “great common work will not lack the individual and local characteristics which make for a kind of variety that does not endanger unity,” but in fact yields a “whole that is the sum of many different elements.” In these few remarks, summarized by Lorenzo, Fanelli touches upon the organizational principle and practice so basic to Anarchism, that order reaches its most harmonious form through the spontaneous, unhampered development of individuality and variety. Ultimately, the vitality of the Spanish Anarchist movement was to depend on the extent to which it made this principle a living force in its social and organizational activites.

Before leaving Spain, Fanelli stopped again in Barcelona. This time he had a letter of introduction from Jose Rubau Donadeu, one of his Madrid converts, to the painter Jose Luis Pellicer, a radical democrat with strong Federalist convictions. Pellicer arranged a meeting in his studio that attracted some twenty Republicans, most of whom were individuals with established professional backgrounds.. This sophisticated, middle-class audience was more skeptical of Fanelli’s impassioned oratory than the Madrilenos. Probably no more than a handful of young men, mostly students, were inclined to commit themselves to the Italian’s Anarchist ideas, but they included Rafael Farga Pellicer, the nephew of Jose Luis, who was to play an important role in establishing the International in Barcelona. By this time, Fanelli was almost out of funds, and after a brief stay in the Catalan seaport, he departed for Marseilles.

Guiseppi Fanelli never returned to Spain. He died only eight years later, a victim of tuberculosis at the age of forty-eight. Like so many young Italians of his day, Fanelli had given up a promising career as an architect and engineer to work for the revolution, at first serving under Garibaldi and later as an emissary of Mazzini. With the victory of the national cause in 1861, he became a deputy in the Italian parliament. His official position earned him the traditional free railway pass to travel all over Italy, and the government provided him with a modest pension for the loss of his health as a political prisoner of the Bourbons. He met Bakunin in 1866 at Ischia, only two years before his journey to Spain, and fell completely under the charismatic spell of the Russian revolutionary. For Fanelli, revolution was a way of life, not merely a distant theoretical goal, and his latter years as a deputy were spent on the railways, preaching social revolution during the day in peasant villages throughout Italy, later returning to sleep in the train at night.

It is doubtful that he fully recognized the scope of his achievement in Spain. Previous attempts to implant Anarchist ideas there go as far back as 1845, when Ramon de la Sagra, a disciple of Proudhon, founded a libertarian journal in Coruna. But the paper, El Poruenir, was soon suppressed by the authorities and Sagra died in exile without exerting any influence in his native country.

Fanelli’s achievement was unique and prophetic. Perhaps there is hyperbole in this story as it has come down to us. But even that is important because it shows the passionately imaginative elements that enter into the Spanish yearnings for freedom. And, we shall see, Spain was uniquely susceptible to Anarchist visions of liberation.