1932, THE ALT LLOBREGAT INSURRECTION IN CATALONIA

Today, The Grandma has been reading about the Alt Llobregat insurrection, that occurred on a day like today in 1932.

The Alt Llobregat insurrection was a revolutionary general strike which took place in central Catalonia in January 1932. Initially organised as a wildcat strike by miners in Fígols, who were protesting against low wages and poor working conditions, it soon turned into a general revolt and spread throughout the region.

Workers seized local institutions, disarmed the police and proclaimed libertarian communism, all without any killing taking place. Within a week, the rebellion was suppressed by the Spanish Army. A subsequent rebellion in Aragon was also suppressed. In the wake of the insurrection, many anarchist activists were imprisoned or deported. The suppression of the insurrection caused a split in the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, with its radical faction ultimately taking control of the organisation and the moderate faction splitting off to form the Syndicalist Party. Further insurrections were carried out by CNT activists in January and December 1933.

When the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed on 14 April 1931, it brought an end to years of dictatorship which had driven the Spanish anarchist movement underground and forced its members into exile. The drafting of the Spanish Constitution of 1931 caused divisions in the Provisional Government. The separation of church and state was approved by the Constituent Cortes on 13 October 1931, with 178 votes in favour and 59 opposed. Members of the Liberal Republican Right, including Prime Minister Niceto Alcalá-Zamora and Interior Minister Miguel Maura, resigned from the provisional government over the issue.

The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), Radical Socialist Republican Party (PRRS) and Republican Action (AR) then came together to form a new left-wing government, excluding the right-wing republican parties. Manuel Azaña became the new prime minister, Santiago Casares Quiroga took over as Interior Minister and José Giral was appointed as Navy Minister. Without the influence of business owners and the Catholic clergy over the new government, many in the working class hoped they would address unemployment and land reform, but neither of these came to fruition.

Instead, on 20 October, the government passed the Law for the Defense of the Republic, which increased the power of the Interior Ministry.

On 9 December 1931, the Constituent Cortes approved the new constitution and elected Alcalá-Zamora as the first President of the Republic. On 11 December, Alcalá-Zamora accepted the nomination, swore to uphold the new constitution and proclaimed the day a national holiday.

While the government ratified the constitution, social conflict spread throughout the nascent Spanish Republic. In Zaragoza, workers proclaimed a general strike; in Xixón, the occupation of factories took place, culminating with the violent intervention of the Civil Guard, which killed 1 worker and wounded 11 others.

On 31 December, Casares Quiroga dispatched the Civil Guard to the Extremaduran town of Castilblanco to suppress a strike action by the local peasantry. Local activists responded to the intervention by surrounding the Civil Guards and killing them. The Civil Guard retaliated against villages throughout the country, attacking La Almarcha, Calzada de Calatrava and Puertollano in New Castile. In the Aragonese town of Épila, the Civil Guard opened fire on striking workers, killing 2 people and wounding several others. The Civil Guard also attacked striking workers in the Valencian town of Xeresa, killing 4 people and wounding 3 others. In the Riojan town of Arnedo, the Civil Guard again opened fire on striking workers, killing 6 men and 5 women and wounding 18 men and 11 women.

In the anarchist newspaper Tierra y Libertad, the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) proclaimed that the country had been kidnapped by the Civil Guard and printed graphic depictions of the violence.

In the Valencian city of Villena, the novelist Pío Baroja proclaimed that the Republic had killed more people in a few months than the monarchy had in forty years. The events in Épila, Xeresa and Arnedo provoked a furious response from anarcho-syndicalists in Barcelona, who began to speak of carrying out a revolution against the Republic.

On 18 January 1932, miners of the Sant Corneli Colony in Fígols carried out a wildcat strike, demanding improvements to their living and working conditions. As they believed the strike would only succeed if they could prevent their employers from repressing it, they disarmed the Civil Guard and the Sometent parapolice force, and they coordinated workers' patrols of the town's streets. The flag of the CNT was raised above the town hall and from the steeple of the local church. Before long, the workers of Fígols had formed a revolutionary committee, which proclaimed the establishment of libertarian communism in the region. According to an oral history by historian Cristina Borderias, the proclamation of communism was broadly accepted by the insurgent populace, for whom it meant social justice and freedom.

When the Catalan Regional Committee of the CNT received news of the insurrection breaking out in Fígols, they moved to support the workers' movement and expand it throughout Berguedà and Bages.

By 20 January, strike actions had spread to the neighbouring towns of Balsareny, Berga and Sallent, then on to Cardona, Navarcles and Súria, where workers shut down the mines and other local businesses. In Sallent, syndicalists seized explosives from the local potash factory and raised a red flag over the town hall. In Manresa, workers picketed outside of factories and workshops. Revolutionaries took control of the region's telephone exchanges and roads. Workers also cut telephone lines, which gave the first indication to the outside world that the strike had escalated into an insurrection. Workers throughout central Catalonia seized their town halls, where they replaced the tricolour flag of the Spanish Republic with the red and black flag of anarchism.

The workers of central Catalonia declared the abolition of private property and the state. They also established a non-monetary economy, replacing money with a system of labour vouchers and the sharing of resources under common ownership. No looting or killing took place during the insurrection. According to reports by the anarchist newspaper La Tierra, the insurgents secured the region without arbitrary attacks against their political enemies, whether police, judges or priests. Once the region had been taken, the insurgent workers returned to their jobs in the coal fields.

On 22 January, reinforcements were brought in from the provinces of Lleida, Girona, Huesca and Zaragoza. The Spanish Army swiftly occupied Manresa. By 23 January, every town in the region had been occupied, except for the revolutionary stonghold of Fígols. The following day, Spanish troops entered the town, where they discovered that the insurgent miners had blown up the explosives warehouse and fled into the mountains.

By 25 January, the insurrection was over and social order was restored in central Catalonia. People in the region who had opposed the insurrection collaborated in the political repression that followed. Miners who had participated in the insurrection were dismissed from their jobs, and only those who had been marginal participants were rehired. In the end, the libertarian communist experiment had lasted less than a week.

The Alt Llobregat insurrection exacerbated the internal divisions in the CNT, which had split into moderate and radical factions. The militants arrested after the insurrection had all been radical faistas (members of the FAI), which briefly strengthened the position of the moderate treintistas within the CNT.

More information: Racó Català

Anarchism is the great liberator of man
from the phantoms that have held him captive;
it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces
for individual and social harmony.

Emma Goldman

FRANCESC FERRER I GUÀRDIA & LIBERTARIAN SCHOOLS

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, the Catalan radical freethinker, anarchist, and educationist leader of the libertarian schools in and around Barcelona, who was born on a day like today in 1909.

Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia (January 10 or 14, 1859-October 13, 1909) was a Catalan radical freethinker, anarchist, and educationist behind a network of secular, private, libertarian schools in and around Barcelona.

His execution, following a revolt in Barcelona, propelled Ferrer into martyrdom and grew an international movement of radicals and libertarians, who established schools in his model and promoted his schooling approach.

Ferrer was raised on a farm near Barcelona, where he developed republican and anti-clerical convictions. As a train conductor, he transmitted messages for the republican leader Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla, exiled in France. Following a failed republican uprising in 1885, Ferrer, too, moved to Paris with his family, where they stayed for 16 years. 

Ferrer began to explore anarchism and education. At the turn of the century, Ferrer had resolved to open a libertarian school modeled on Paul Robin's Prévost orphanage school. A large inheritance from a Parisian tutee provided the means to do so.

Upon returning to Barcelona in 1901, Ferrer founded the Barcelona Modern School, Escola Moderna, which sought to provide a secular, libertarian curriculum as an alternative to the religious dogma and compulsory lessons common within Spanish schools. 

Ferrer's pedagogy borrowed from a tradition of 18th century rationalism and 19th century romanticism. He held that children should wield freewheeling liberties at the expense of conformity, regulation, and discipline. 

His school eschewed punishments, rewards, and exams, and encouraged practical experience over academic study. The school hosted lectures for adults, a school for teacher training, and a radical printing press, which printed textbooks and the school's journal. 

Around 120 offshoots of the school spread throughout Spain. The rapidity of Ferrer's rise troubled Spanish church and state authorities, who viewed the school as a front for insurrectionary activity. 

Ferrer was held in association with the 1906 assassination attempt on the Spanish King, which was used as a pretext for closing the school, but was ultimately released without conviction under international pressure a year later. 

Ferrer traveled Europe as an advocate of the Spanish revolutionary cause, founded a libertarian education advocacy organization, and reopened his press.

In mid-1909, Ferrer was arrested and accused of orchestrating a week of insurrection known as Barcelona's Tragic Week. Though Ferrer's involvement was likely not as blameless as intimated by his peers, he did not mastermind the events as charged. The ensuing court case, remembered as a show trial by a kangaroo court, resulted in Ferrer's execution and triggered international outcry, as Ferrer was widely believed to be innocent at the time of his death. He was prominently memorialized in writing, monuments, and demonstrations across three continents. The protest became a movement to propagate his educational ideas, and Modern Schools in his name sprouted across the United States and Europe, reaching into Brazil and Asia.

More information: Fundació Ferrer i Guàrdia (Catalan Version)

Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia was born January 10 or 14, 1859, on a farm near Barcelona in Alella, Catalonia. He became a republican and freethinker in his youth. While his parents were pious Catholics, he grew independent and anti-clerical convictions from his freethinker uncle and militant atheist first employer.

During his mid-20s, Ferrer had become a radical Republican. In 1883, he was initiated into the Masonic Lodge Verdad in Barcelona (Lodge Number 146 of the Gran Oriente de España, under the leadership of Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla), taking on the symbolic name, Brother Cero, he reached the 32°.

He used his position as a train conductor on a route between France and Barcelona to transmit messages for the exiled Republican leader Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla and shepherd republicans, radicals and freemasons to sanctuary. After supporting an attempted coup under General Manuel Villacampa del Castillo who intended to install a Spanish Republic in late 1886, Ferrer was himself forced to flee to France with his wife and three daughters, where they would stay for 16 years. While in France, Ferrer kept up his masonic activities with the Grand Orient de France.

In Paris, Ferrer taught Spanish, sold wine on commission, volunteered as Ruíz's secretary (until his 1895 death), and pursued radical efforts. He was a Dreyfusard, a delegate to the London 1896 Congress of the Second International, and a teacher at the Masonic school.

With this inheritance, Ferrer returned to Spain in 1901, where he would open the Barcelona Modern School, Escola Moderna. Spain was in a time of self-reflection after losing the Spanish-American War, particularly regarding their national education.

Liberals and radicals wanted more secular curriculum, with new scientific, historical, and sociological content and teachers not beholden to diocesan inspectors. 

Ferrer, a fervent atheist, became prominent in these conversations and advocated for a rational school as an alternative to the religious dogma and compulsory lessons common within Spanish schools. As a speaker, he was unpretentious and uncharismatic, but his sincerity and capacity for organization inspired others.

Ferrer followed in a rough and ready Spanish tradition of extragovernment, rationalist education: the republicans and Fourierists schools (1840-50s), the anarchist and secularist schools (1870-80s), Paul Robin's Cempuis orphanage, Elías Puig (Catalonia), and José Sanchez Rosa (Andalusia).

Ferrer's libertarian pedagogy also borrowed from 18th century rationalism, 19th century romanticism, and pedagogues including Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Kropotkin, and Tolstoy. This tradition pursued freewheeling liberties for children at the expense of conformity, regulation, and discipline. It combined play and crafts alongside academic work and championed traits of reason, dignity, self-reliance, and scientific observation over that of piety and obedience. It advocated for learning through experience rather than drilled instruction by rote, and for treating children with love and warmth.

This model's adherents, in seeking a school that eschewed religious and political authority, thought that changes in mass education would circumvent the stunted public enlightenment and preservation of status quo that they blamed on the influence of both church and state. 

Free education, to Ferrer, entailed educators who would use improvised experimentation to arouse the child's will and autodidactic drive rather than impose their own dogmatic ideas through formal curriculum.

More information: The Anarchist Library

The Escola Moderna opened on Barcelona's Carrer de les Corts with thirty students in September 1901. More than 126 students were enrolled five years later, in 1906, when the state shuttered the school. The Escola Moderna charged sliding scale tuition based on parental capacity to pay, and divided students into three curricular levels. Ferrer's pedagogy sought to strip dogma from education and instead help children direct their own powers. 

Ferrer's school eschewed punishments and rewards, which he felt incentivized deception over sincerity. Similarly, he did not adopt grades or exams, whose propensity to flatter, deflate, and torture Ferrer considered injurious. 

Ferrer prioritized practical knowledge over theory and encouraged children to experience rather than read. Lessons entailed visits to local factories, museums, and parks where the objects of the lesson could be experienced firsthand. Pupils planned their own work and were trusted and free to attend as they pleased.

The rapidity of Ferrer's rise in influence troubled Spanish authorities. His monetary inheritance and organizing ability amplified his subversive efforts, and authorities viewed his school as a front for insurrectionary sentiment.

Ferrer represented peril to many social institutions -the church, the state, the military, the family, gender segregation, property- and the conservatives who wished to preserve them.

Ferrer was intimidated and vilified for his work in Barcelona. Police raided his house and tailed his movements. He was subject to slanderous public rumors to tarnish his reputation, including intonations of gambling, financial speculation, and hedonism. Ferrer's various romantic relations with women were presented as indications of his school's moral lessons.

In 1905, Ferrer and the Modern School voiced their opposition to bullfighting, cautioning against using abolition of the practice as a means to stoke political nationalism.

Ferrer was arrested at the end of August 1909 following the previous month's civil unrest and week of outright insurrection in Barcelona known as Tragic Week. Citizens, wary from a prior war and governmental corruption, originally demonstrated against a call for military reserves to fight a renewed colonial war in Morocco. The general strike called by Solidaridad Obrera culminated in a week of riots, which killed hundreds in and around Barcelona, and mass arrests, which led to torture, deportation, and execution. Ferrer was charged with orchestrating the rebellion and became its most famous casualty.

Although Ferrer participated in the events of the Catalan Tragic Week, he did not mastermind the events as charged. Reliable retellings of the insurrection credit spontaneous forces rather than anarchist premeditation. The evidence presented at Ferrer's military court trial included testimony from his political enemies and Ferrer's prior subversive writings, but no evidence of his having orchestrated the rebellion. Ferrer maintained his innocence and was barred from presenting complementary testimony.

The court case, which would culminate in Ferrer's death by firing squad, is remembered as being quickly decided. Historian Paul Avrich later summarized the case as judicial murder, a successful attempt to quell an agitator whose ideas were dangerous to the status quo, as retribution for not convicting him in the Morral affair. His last words before the firing squad of Montjuïc Castle on October 13, 1909, were, Aim well, my friends. You are not responsible. I am innocent. Long live the Modern School!

Beyond anarchism, liberals across society viewed Ferrer as a martyr to the collusion of a vengeful church and traditionalist state. Protests in many of Europe's major cities coincided with hundreds of meetings across America, Europe, and Asia. A 15,000-person throng descended on Paris's Spanish embassy, and the anarchist black flag draped from the Milan Cathedral. British luminaries spoke in outrage, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle alongside anarchists Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Tarrida. Ferrer's death was covered widely, from the front page of The New York Times to a number of books.

The worldwide protest became the Ferrer educational movement in his honour.

More information: Kate Sharpley Library

Governments have ever been known
to hold a high hand over the education of the people.
They know, better than anyone else,
that their power is based almost entirely on the school.
Hence, they monopolize it more and more.

 

Francesc Ferrer i Guardia

HENRY D. THOREAU, ANARCHISM & CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Henry David Thoureau

Today, The Grandma has been relaxing at home. The situation against the COVID19 is not good and she prefers to reduce her movements, go out street only if it is necessary and spend time at home reading and watching interesting things.

She has chosen Henry David Thoureau, the American essayist, poet, and philosopher who was born on a day like today in 1817.

Thoureau is one of The Grandma's favourite authors. She likes his poetry and his essays and she shares his ideas about anarchism, libertinism and civil disobedience. In fact, we can consider Thoureau a great referent for The Grandma. She remembers when she visited the Thoureau's cabin in the woods in Walden.

The Grandma believes that the best way to pay homage to Henry D. Thoureau is talking about his life, his works and his beliefs.

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817-May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, originally published as Resistance to Civil Government, an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism.

More information: The Thoreau Society

His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and attention to practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.

He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown.

Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Henry David Thoureau

Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist. Though Civil Disobedience seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government -I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government- the direction of this improvement contrarily points toward anarchism: 'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts, into the modest New England family of John Thoreau, a pencil maker, and Cynthia Dunbar.

His paternal grandfather had been born on the UK crown dependency island of Jersey. His maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, led Harvard's 1766 student Butter Rebellion, the first recorded student protest in the American colonies.

The traditional professions open to college graduates -law, the church, business, medicine-did not interest Thoreau, so in 1835 he took a leave of absence from Harvard, during which he taught at a school in Canton, Massachusetts.

After he graduated in 1837, he joined the faculty of the Concord public school, but he resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment. He and his brother John then opened the Concord Academy, a grammar school in Concord, in 1838.

More information: Thoreau Online

They introduced several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses. The school closed when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving. He died in Henry's arms.

Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson through a mutual friend. Emerson, who was 14 years his senior, took a paternal and at times patron-like interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers, including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian Hawthorne, who was a boy at the time.

More information: The Walden Woods Project

Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, The Dial, and lobbied the editor, Margaret Fuller, to publish those writings. Thoreau's first essay published in The Dial was Aulus Persius Flaccus, an essay on the Roman playwright, in July 1840. It consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson's suggestion. The first journal entry, on October 22, 1837, reads, 'What are you doing now?' he asked. 'Do you keep a journal?' So I make my first entry to-day.

Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years he followed Transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott.

The Grandma visited the Thoreau's cabin, Walden

They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts, as Emerson wrote in Nature (1836).

Thoreau felt a need to concentrate and work more on his writing. In March 1845, Ellery Channing told Thoreau, Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.

Two months later, Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living on July 4, 1845, when he moved to a small house he had built on land owned by Emerson in a second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was in a pretty pasture and woodlot of 57,000 m2 that Emerson had bought, 2.4 km from his family home.

On July 24 or July 25, 1846, Thoreau ran into the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican-American War and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. The next day Thoreau was freed when someone, likely to have been his aunt, paid the tax, against his wishes.

The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau. In January and February 1848, he delivered lectures on The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government, explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum.

More information: Mental Floss

Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay titled Resistance to Civil Government, also known as Civil Disobedience. It was published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Aesthetic Papers in May 1849

Thoreau had taken up a version of Percy Shelley's principle in the political poem The Mask of Anarchy (1819), which begins with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action.

At Walden Pond, Thoreau completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an elegy to his brother John, describing their trip to the White Mountains in 1839.

Henry David Thoureau

Thoreau did not find a publisher for the book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense; fewer than 300 were sold. He self-published the book on the advice of Emerson, using Emerson's publisher, Munroe, who did little to publicize the book.

In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and narratives of travel and expedition. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal.

He admired William Bartram and Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to anticipate the seasons of nature, in his word.

He became a land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed observations on the natural history of the town, covering an area of 67 km2, in his journal, a two-million-word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source of his late writings on natural history, such as Autumnal Tints, The Succession of Trees, and Wild Apples, an essay lamenting the destruction of indigenous wild apple species.

With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism as academic disciplines, several new readings of Thoreau began to emerge, showing him to have been both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots.

More information: Poetry Foundation

For instance, The Succession of Forest Trees, shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through the dispersal of seeds by winds or animals.

In this lecture, first presented to a cattle show in Concord, and considered his greatest contribution to ecology, Thoreau explained why one species of tree can grow in a place where a different tree did previously. He observed that squirrels often carry nuts far from the tree from which they fell to create stashes. These seeds are likely to germinate and grow should the squirrel die or abandon the stash. He credited the squirrel for performing a great service... in the economy of the universe.

More information: Finantial Times

Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically afterwards.

In 1860, following a late-night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined, with brief periods of remission, and he eventually became bedridden.

Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly The Maine Woods and Excursions, and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of A Week and Walden.

More information: Gutenberg

If the machine of government is of such a nature

that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another,

then, I say, break the law.

Henry David Thoreau