his group overturned a cart carrying bricks in the street. At twenty-one, he was a ‘man of action’ or, as he described it, one of the ‘nerve cells that set in motion from below the machinery of the CNT’.62 When he later reflected on his motivations at this time, he recalled that:
I was stimulated by revolutionary romanticism… I was attracted most of all by ideological problems. The business of sticking stamps on union cards and assembling the workers to preach to them did not appeal to me. I preferred getting involved in conflicts with the employers and confronting the security forces…63 I was a simple grassroots activist… In our movement, there existed two classes: the Areopagites and those who worked hard clashing with the scabs and the cops who protected them. We were the movement’s worker ants who organised and declared strikes, which we sustained with our blows and our coshes; we drew up the ‘demands’ which we later negotiated with the employers.64
The landscape of struggle changed at the end of January 1930 with the ignominious collapse of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. Alfonso XIII replaced it with General Dámaso Berenguer’s ‘soft dictatorship’ (‘dictablanda’), which was conceived to manufacture a limited democratic opening capable of saving the monarchy and returning to the political system that had been highly discredited by 1923. Peirats met the new dictator in person as part of the ‘Guiot–Climent Support Group’, which was formed to save the lives of two brickmakers sentenced to death. The case dated back to the robbery and murder of a financial agent in January 1924 by a four-man gang. Only Remigio Climent and Enrique Guiot were detained; the former being found guilty of murder, the latter of being his accomplice. Having refused to reveal the identities of their two escaped associates, both men were sentenced to death in a military court, even though it was unclear whether either had fired the fatal shot. After spending three years on death row, in 1927 their sentences were reduced to life imprisonment.65 The ‘Guiot–Climent Support Group’, which included fellow brickmakers Massoni, Canela, and Peirats, then pushed for their release. José even corresponded with Guiot in jail on a regular basis in a bid to raise his spirits. Eventually, General Berenguer received members of the group, including Peirats, led by veteran Barcelona activist, Juan López. While Berenguer only offered vague promises, the collapse of the monarchy a year later ensured the release of the prisoners.66
For Peirats, this was the start of an ‘infernal decade of action’.67 While still involved with his affinity group, Verdad, he was increasingly active in the clandestine CNT, participating in the struggle for the release of social prisoners and for new freedoms that would hasten the union’s reorganisation. He participated in the meetings that drafted the statutes of the Barcelona CNT, which were approved by the civil governor in April 1930. Nevertheless, the most emotive moment in the CNT’s rebirth was the massive rally held in the Paral.lel’s Teatro Nuevo on 27 April. The auditorium, with a capacity for around 2,500 people, could not cope with the human multitude that answered the CNT’s call, and many people had to content themselves with following the speeches on loudspeakers in the street outside. The majority of the speakers were older activists, such as Massoni, Joan Peiró, and Pestaña, the CNT’s general secretary. More inclined to syndicalism, and all of them veterans of the pre-1923 era, these militants had spearheaded the reorganisation of the CNT in the preceding months and were attempting to chart a course through the limited freedoms permitted by the dictablanda.
Tactical differences quickly came to the surface. Divergences were evident over the CNT’s relationship with the wider opposition to the monarchy, which included dissident army officers, renegade monarchist politicians, socialists, and republicans. Peiró, one of the many activists in contact with the political opposition, came in for fierce criticism for signing a manifesto with republican groups in support of a socially progressive democracy. Urales, always at loggerheads with the anarcho-syndicalists, inveighed against the ‘political’ compromises of leading CNT figures. Yet it was not just the more moderate anarcho-syndicalists who flirted with opposition politicians; for instance, Felipe Aláiz, a radical anarchist who later became Peirats’s most important mentor, shared a platform with leading Catalan republicans.68 While Peirats had much in common with the anarchist radicals, his social background and his quest for class struggle predisposed him towards the anarcho-syndicalists, and he was intoxicated by his new experiences within the CNT.69
The CNT’s struggle for economic demands resulted in a wave of social mobilisations and strikes during 1930–1 and this increasingly dovetailed with the campaign for political and civil liberties. Beset by its own internal and external contradictions, the monarchy buckled under the weight of the spiralling dynamics of protest that its very existence engendered until, on 14 April 1931, the Second Republic was proclaimed. This momentous event opened up a new phase in Peirats’s life, in which the ‘anarchist family’ would become his real family.
Chapter Three: The Second Republic:
The split in the anarchist movement and ‘revolutionary gymnastics’ (1931–33)
3.1 The short republican honeymoon
For José, 14 April 1931 began like any other working day: he rose and set off on foot to the Sants brickworks where he was employed. He would have been aware that, two days earlier, municipal elections had been converted by the liberal-left opposition into a plebiscite on the future of the monarchy. With the CNT leadership calculating that the unions would get a better deal under a democracy, many grassroots cenetistas had been encouraged to vote. It is highly unlikely that more anarchist-inclined activists like José, firm in their anti-political convictions as they were, participated in the proceedings. Yet many thousands of workers voted and, in Barcelona and L’Hospitalet, the monarchists failed to win a single council seat. As news spread of the leftist opposition victory in the major urban centres, anti-monarchist crowds took to the streets in a show of pro-republican feeling. By afternoon, José knew something big was in the air when he saw an animated group marching towards central Barcelona carrying the republican tricolour flag. As the hubbub outside grew, he left work and walked a short distance to Gran Vía, a major artery leading to the city centre, where he saw ‘a human wave’ coming from L’Hospitalet.1 Meanwhile, in the corridors of power, profound fissures opened up within the elite. Mindful of the isolation of the discredited monarch, General José Sanjurjo, head of the Civil Guard, respectfully informed the king that his erstwhile praetorian guard would not block a democratic opening. The path was now laid to the proclamation of a republic.
Peirats witnessed emotional scenes as workers from neighbouring barrios converged on Plaza de España to celebrate the demise of the monarchy, what for many was a despised authority structure. Amidst huge popular revelry, people climbed on tram roofs and waved republican flags. Peirats did not join the celebrations, though. Going against the flow of the wave of jubilant humanity descending on central Barcelona, he set off for the CNT’s La Torrassa office, where he met other activists keen to define their position in the face of these momentous events. Peirats and his comrades appreciated the need to gain maximum advantage from what they perceived was a fluid situation. This meant forcing events, in a bid to accelerate history. That afternoon, he was part of a crowd of ‘several thousand’ protesting outside the Modelo prison for the release of the social prisoners, who eventually regained their freedom.2 Later that evening, there was an armed clash between security forces and anarchists, as the latter attempted to seize weapons from a police station near the port. The confrontation left a soldier dead and several civilians wounded, including Conrado Ruiz Vilaró, a close comrade of Peirats, who later died from his wounds. With tensions running high, republican politicians were on the streets trying to defuse the situation, promising further change was possible only through legal channels: ‘It was the same old tune… We knew that their promises would go unfulfilled.’3 As well as promises, the newly ensconced republican ‘revolutionary committee’ hastily formed a ‘security guard’ to augment the public order role of the police and the army.4
With the coming of the Republic, militants like Peirats represented the left wing of the CNT and of the libertarian movement. A strategic-generational conflict developed, as some older activists,
