to which the movement had been subjected since 1921, were prepared to offer the Republic a degree of leeway, in the hope that democracy would allow for the CNT’s reorganisation. Yet, radicals like Peirats gave no quarter to the new regime. After the enforced interregnum of the dictatorship, they were primed and ready for direct action.
It is naïve to berate these ideologically committed libertarians for not becoming liberal democrats on April 14: they were doctrinally opposed to what they saw as an inherently limited bourgeois democracy that offered formal political equality but left the economic structure of oppression inherited from the monarchy intact. Likewise, in strategic terms, as activists committed to direct action as a means of wresting concessions from the authorities and employers, it made sense to them to build on the ascendant curve of mobilisation that had contributed to the fall of the monarchy. Convinced that the republicans were incapable of advancing the cause of social progress whatsoever, the radicals sought to intensify protest dynamics and channel them towards short-term gains on the road to liberation. They regarded any respite in popular mobilisation as a capitulation to the new authorities. As Peirats later reflected:
The vast majority of those leftist politicians… were individuals who, because of their mentality and political education, thought that by unseating the monarchists their hour had come.5 The republicans had reached the end of journey and had alighted from the train. For them, the revolution – their revolution – was already a fact. Their main leaders would soon find themselves suckling restlessly at the teat of money. We were now alone on the road to ‘complete emancipation’.6
Nevertheless, he and his associates were optimistic that the republican spring, and the limited political freedom accompanying it, would at least provide them with a new scope to develop their activism. Indeed, during the Republic, the worker-activists of José’s generation came of age. Part of a new mass working class formed by the accelerated industrialisation of the 1910s and 1920s, their youth had prevented them from playing a prominent role in the pre-1923 struggles. As we will see, these younger workers were the major protagonists of the struggles that radicalised the CNT in the prelude to the July 1936 revolution.
The day after the birth of the Republic, the CNT organised a general strike which, according to one militant, was ‘total in Catalonia’, but ‘the atmosphere was one of fiesta, not struggle.’7 Peirats went to the central Barcelona office of the Construction Union, a union that had radicalised during the final months of struggle against the monarchy and that would emerge as the flagship of radical anarcho-syndicalist practice prior to the civil war, constantly clashing against local employers and authorities. Besides debating the new political situation, the construction activists developed a strategy to defend the most pressing needs of the dispossessed – the struggle against unemployment and high rents.8 It is possible that later that day José was part of a mobile group which toured the city to gather intelligence and seize arms, since he was well informed of the extra guards posted around army garrisons following the clash with security forces the previous day.9
The next major CNT activity in which Peirats participated was the May Day rally, the first celebration of the International Workers’ Day that fell barely two weeks after the birth of the Republic. An inevitably emotive gathering, it was all the more poignant since the CNT had chosen to assemble at the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts), its birthplace in 1910. Now, it proved woefully inadequate for what some estimates suggest were 150,000 workers on the streets. The rally was followed by a demonstration over a two-kilometre route through central Barcelona to the recently named Plaza de la República (now Plaça de Sant Jaume), the site of the city’s main official buildings, where the marchers planned to submit a list of demands to the authorities. Peirats was near the front of the demonstration when he witnessed the peaceful march turn violent. As the square brimmed with demonstrators, shots rang out. There was pandemonium, as people fled for safety. In the mêlée, Peirats was swept away by the movement of the crowd and thrown to the ground, with people running and crawling over him. Bodies piled up on top of him and he found it impossible to get up, struggling for breath, while the shooting continued. He was extremely lucky to escape unscathed: one policeman lay dead and two more were wounded, along with ten workers. Once able to get up, he expected to be surrounded by dead bodies. To his amazement, he saw none, just an array of discarded jackets, hats, shoes, and espadrilles, which was opportune as he had lost his and was able to select a pair that fitted him before walking home to L’Hospitalet.10 This would not be the last time that he would escape alive from potentially mortal circumstances.
The events of that day remain confused. It is certain that there were right-wing gunmen from the Free Unions in the square with the intention of provoking a disturbance. It seems likely that one of their number was identified by a CNT steward, who discharged his weapon, prompting an initial exchange of gunfire. Given the proximity of the Council and Generalitat buildings, the security forces responded, provoking a second, apparently three-way, firefight lasting intermittently for around forty-five minutes, as armed cenetistas took cover in the four corners of the square.11 Another version – which also acknowledges the presence of right-wing provocateurs – suggests that the first shots came from police guarding the Catalan government building.12 It is doubtless, guided by memories of police assassinations of cenetistas in the 1920s, that the situation was defused only with the arrival of soldiers, who were cheered into the square as ‘sons of the people’ and whom, the marchers believed, would not open fire on workers.13
We can only speculate about the extent of Peirats’s involvement that day. He never admitted to being armed, but it is significant that he was at the vanguard of a militant demonstration headed by armed stewards. Moreover, as we know, Peirats had used firearms in the course of his CNT activities and, as we will see, these activities became more frequent. Years later, he acknowledged that he knew that his local barber from La Torrassa was involved in the gunfight, as he recognised the sound of his Smith and Wesson revolver.14 It is also possible that they went to the demonstration together. Whatever the case, in Peirats’s eyes, the events and their violent denouement confirmed his view that the new authorities would, ineluctably, rely on the same repressive apparatus as the monarchy and the dictatorship had and that it was, therefore, struggle as usual.
3.2 ‘The university of La Torrassa’
Behind the noisy street mobilisations, Peirats was one of the thousands of anonymous activists who were busy reorganising the anarchist public sphere that had been largely snuffed out by the dictatorship after 1923. The rapid expansion of this subaltern public sphere after the birth of the Republic reflected the accumulation of social demands in the preceding eight years, when economic, social, and cultural advances had been systematically eroded. The CNT grew vertiginously: by August 1931, it claimed 400,000 members in Catalonia, while the Barcelona CNT announced that it encadred 58 per cent of the city’s workers. Peirats’s Construction Union put its membership at 25,000, while the L’Hospitalet CNT affirmed it organised 9,000 workers out of a total population of 37,650 (almost 24 per cent).15 In fact, since many hospitalenses worked in Barcelona and were affiliated to the CNT there, the total number of cenetistas was far higher.16
There was also a rapid expansion of athenaeums throughout the Barcelona area. Local workers were desperate for culture and, according to one activist, ‘athenaeum fever’ erupted, due to the craving for knowledge.17 In L’Hospitalet, in 1930, 42.5 per cent of men and 54.1 per cent of women were illiterate, while the figures would have been higher still among La Torrassa’s migrant populace.18 Aware that a people without culture would be less capable of taking control of its destiny, José and his group were determined to disseminate the revolutionary ideas they had refined during the dictatorship and bring culture to this most neglected district. Their efforts helped convert La Torrassa into what one expert describes as ‘one of the most important neighbourhoods in the history of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism’19 or, as La Vanguardia described it, a district with a ‘preponderance’ of ‘extremist elements’.20
Before the Republic, the local elite that resided in the centre of L’Hospitalet already viewed the residents of La Torrassa with a mixture of suspicion and condescension.
