that of many young anarchists: to declare himself a fugitive (prófugo) and go to France. This plan led to a bitter row with his mother, who was chastened by the abortive flight of her nephew Vicente to France and his subsequent incarceration. Teresa cried and pleaded with Peirats to reconsider. Resorting to emotional blackmail, she accused him of abandoning the parents who sacrificed so much for him during his illness. They reached a compromise, rooted in his mother’s conviction that he would be deemed unfit for military service due to his limp. Accordingly, José would present himself for medical examination and, in the event that he was declared fit, he would flee to France. To the amazement of all, the army doctor declared him fit for active service. Before he could make plans to cross the border, his mother seized the initiative and arranged for a second examination by an independent doctor, who diagnosed him as suffering from ‘curvature and necrosis of the head of the femur’ and ‘progressive paralysis with atrophy’ in the hip – a judgement consistent with Perthes disease. Upon appeal, José was declared ‘fit for auxiliary service’, although this was postponed, with the requirement he report every two years for an army medical examination.46
Free now to focus on his activism, and with the dictatorship tottering under the weight of its internal contradictions, José became one of the ‘Young Turks’47 who played a decisive role in the ascendant protest curve of 1929–31. Following years of clandestine action, these activists emerged from the shadows to overcome their sense of collective trepidation. At times, their protest actions were limited to their neighbourhood, where they felt safer. For example, José and his group stymied plans to build a hermitage in Collblanc. Every time a wall was erected, he and ‘the followers of Atila’ knocked it down until the project was aborted.48
He directed much energy into reorganising the CNT. With his fellow brickmakers and Massoni, he revived the Brickmakers’ Union.49 To organise openly, the impatient brickmakers decided to comply with the existing labour legislation and form a legally constituted professional association. While the veteran Massoni was at the helm, a younger group of activists, including Peirats (who was elected librarian of the brickmakers’ social centre), came to the fore. These youngsters pressurised union leaders to release funds for new activities, including a newspaper. Thus was born El Boletín del Ladrillero, an occasional publication produced by the militants grouped around Peirats and Canela. Reflecting the rapid cultural development of those gathered around El Boletín, they were convinced of the transforming power of the written word and sought to raise the moral level of brickmakers and, in general, to dignify the working-class condition. As Peirats acknowledged:
[W]e endeavoured to instil our members with a social culture. We had swotted up on literature and sociology during the eight-years’ peace of the dictatorship. We hadn’t wasted any time.50
Issue one included José’s first published article ‘La palabra ladrillero, sinónimo de perversión’, a defence of his co-workers while also a fierce attack on the culture of gambling, drinking, and whoring prevalent among young brickmakers.51 If we recall Peirats’s adolescent nights in bars and brothels, he was well informed of the problem against which he rallied. His first writings display many of the qualities that came to characterise his journalism: a keen eye for synthesis and an aversion to the excessive use of adjectives; a preference for direct prose, based on short, clear sentences; the combative title; the vehement and implacable moral tenor and polemical tone; and the unyielding view that misery can be transcended by beauty. As in his later writings, he confidently grappled with a big question; in this case, what he saw as the main cultural problem facing brickmakers. His combative writing style and his refusal to back away from a struggle were in part inspired by his personal fight with the consequences of Perthes disease. He readily conceded to a friend that the ‘inferiority complex’ caused by his leg impairment conditioned his confrontational prose.52
Testimony to his potential as a writer, even at this young age, José was named editor of El Boletín, just months after its launch. This is more remarkable still when we consider that he only started writing in Castilian when he was twenty, in 1928, the same year his first article appeared.53 Though Catalan remained his first language, his readiness to write in Castilian reflected a desire to address the newly arrived migrants and, moreover, to use a language capable of uniting the working class across the Spanish state. Although El Boletín was formally the mouthpiece of a specific occupational sector within the local union movement, given the limited press freedoms of the day, it acquired an echo within the clandestine Barcelona CNT and attracted contributions from some of the leading movement figures, such as Ángel Pestaña and Progreso Alfarache, thereby drawing Peirats into closer contact with prominent cenetistas. Further evidence of his cultural-propagandist inclinations came in 1929, when his short play La Venus desnuda was serialised in El Boletín.54
So what of Peirats’s politics? He can best be described as an internationalist anarchist syndicalist: he was a trade unionist, but this was subordinate to his overriding libertarian aims. This was reflected in the press he read: he subscribed to New York’s Cultura Proletaria, which was produced by Pedro Esteve, an exiled Catalan and former comrade of Anselmo Lorenzo. Meanwhile, Canela received Buenos Aires’s La Protesta, which advocated an ‘anarchist workers’ movement’, a formula associated with the Spanish-born Diego Abad de Santillán (Sinesio Baudilio García Fernández) and his Argentine ally, Emilio López Arango.55 Peirats backed this project of an exclusively anarchist syndicalism, even though it clashed with the ‘one big union’ anarcho-syndicalist conception of those rebuilding the CNT at the time, including his mentor Massoni, who conceived of a less ideological movement. Later, as we will see, in the early 1930s, he broke with this schema after it contributed to a split in the CNT between the supporters of explicitly anarchist workers’ associations and those who wanted ideologically diverse unions.
Besides following debates within transatlantic Hispanic anarcho-syndicalism, Peirats was fully apprised of the CNT’s internal disputes at this time. He developed a profoundly classist and eminently anarcho-syndicalist dislike of the ideological anarchism of Juan Montseny (Federico Urales). Urales was the founder of La Revista Blanca, the flagship journal of Spanish anarchism, part of what Dolors Marín describes as his ‘publishing enterprise’.56 Peirats saw Urales as ‘an old anarchist converted into a petit bourgeois of libertarian publishing’ – a view that concurred with that of his old school teacher, Roigé, who described him as a ‘parasite [vividor] of ideas’. José also recoiled against Urales’s individualist anarchism, along with that of ideologues like Émile Armand, the French propagandist of ‘free love’ then much in vogue, whose ideas he rejected as ‘almost pure libertinism’.57 Most of all, he disliked Urales’s anti-CNT stance and the ‘poisonous and indiscriminate campaigns against union leaders’.58 Presaging the divisions that would split the CNT just a few years later, the young anarcho-syndicalists were stupefied at news that Federica Montseny (Urales’s daughter and one of the most polemical figures in Spanish anarchist history) had struck a member of a clandestine CNT committee during an argument over money collected by La Revista Blanca in the name of the social prisoners – money that the Urales refused to hand over to the CNT Comité pro Presos (Prisoners’ Support Committee).59 Peirats had a lingering distrust of middle-class anarchist intellectuals and, as we will see, he later clashed with Montseny, who inherited her father’s mantle as the leading theoretician of Iberian anarchism.
With the CNT flexing its muscles after its enforced slumber, the focus of Peirats’s activism shifted into the streets. Years of declining living standards overseen by the employer-friendly dictatorship had left the brickmakers frustrated and, in late 1929, the Brickmakers’ Union declared a strike. Since the dictatorship’s official labour policy was rooted in arbitration courts (the Comités Paritarios – literally, Parity Committees), which forbade direct industrial action, the strike was a frontal challenge to the regime.60 To enforce the stoppage, the Brickmakers’ Union created action squads, of which Peirats was a member. Although deemed unfit for military service, his commitment to the cause compensated for his physical difficulties and, pistol in hand, he served capably in the CNT’s paramilitary squads.61 Distributed strategically across the city, these armed groups, as José explained, were directed at strike-breakers: ‘We stopped them and
