extremely high levels of criminality and parental neglect’.21 With the creation of an autonomous Generalitat government, La Torrassa was demonised as a ‘decatalanised’ space, labelled ‘Little Murcia’, home to the stereotypical migrant – the ‘backward’ and ‘savage’ ‘uncultured Murcian’.22 Of all the different groups of migrants from across the Spanish state, Murcians were singled out as the source of all Catalonia’s problems, as the middle-class republicans in the Generalitat, like the Catalan bourgeois patricians before them, adopted a colonial-style mentality towards working-class ‘outsiders’. As always with such panics, the reality was more complex: according to the 1930 census, over 50 per cent of hospitalenses were Catalan; migrants from Murcia and Almería constituting just 18 per cent.23 For Peirats, La Torrassa was a place of hope, ‘a compact town, genuinely working-class, and underdeveloped in every sense’,24 for whom the Republic brought no change to the overarching structure of oppression. The August 1931 outbreak of bubonic plague highlighted the official neglect in the area.25
La Torrassa’s dense network of CNT supporters converted the district into ‘a focal point for social ferment’,26 ‘famous in the sensationalist press for the rebelliousness and the bellicosity of its inhabitants’, and it was here that Peirats focussed much of his activism prior to the civil war.27 He was one of the founders of La Torrassa Rationalist Athenaeum.28 Based in Llançà Street, just a few blocks away from his Collblanc home, the centre was born thanks to the sacrifice of local workers. Peirats and other brickmakers scraped together the rent and deposit for the premises, while carpenters provided desks, chairs, and shelves. Modelled on the Sants Rationalist Athenaeum of his youth, the athenaeum organised evening classes, theatre productions, musical recitals, public talks, and debates and also housed a library. Its meeting rooms were used by local anarchist and neighbourhood groups,29 and along with its supporters, the athenaeum intervened in local community struggles.30
Peirats invested considerable energy in the athenaeum, and its cultural vision closely resembled his ideas.31 In keeping with the notion that the workers had to grasp universal culture, and in contrast to the ‘proletarian culture’ then de rigueur in Stalinist circles, the library included works by Marxist, bourgeois, and even reactionary authors, along with the anarchist classics. Similarly, speakers from diverse political tendencies were invited to address the athenaeum, with the only prerequisite that they accept open debate with the audience after their talk.32 Highlighting the activists’ democratic approach to the battle for ideas, on one occasion, a public debate was organised with an extreme conservative cleric. Another promoted activity was hiking, which complemented José’s appreciation of beauty as a counterpoint to a lived environment rendered ugly by capitalist urbanism. Hiking was especially popular with younger workers, who could escape for the day to nearby countryside or beaches. Important in its own right given the absence of affordable commercial forms of leisure, hiking also had vital cultural, political, and pedagogical dimensions: groups might discuss important political questions or a previously agreed text. The activists also organised mass picnics, which attracted entire families, with organised games and learning activities for children, while the adults either just relaxed or participated in debates.33 For Peirats, these activities were essential for attracting the youth to the movement, one of his lifelong concerns.34
The athenaeum was an unqualified success and it quickly became an important community institution for all generations, ‘a family home’.35 As Peirats noted proudly, it embellished the everyday life of the dispossessed and, for this reason, ‘we swept the neighbourhood along with us.’36 Weekend plays were particularly well attended, drawing audiences of over 200. Soon, the athenaeum was attracting people from neighbouring Barcelona and it was obliged to relocate to bigger premises in nearby Pujós Street, whereupon its activities were expanded.37 Nevertheless, according to one participant, the new space was, at times, too small for the number of people who attended the most popular functions.38 To evade repression, the activists also operated under the name Amigos del Arte Escénico, which organised theatre and film events right up until the civil war.39
The majority of L’Hospitalet’s anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist activists passed through the doors of the athenaeum. This played a pivotal role in shaping the culture of the local CNT, and it reaffirmed the essentially proletarian nature of movements whose most prominent militants and ‘leaders’ were, like Peirats, invariably working-class autodidacts. Fiercely loyal to the movement that formed them, and unlike the salaried ‘professional revolutionaries’ of the communist parties, these activists remained within the world of labour – their direct experience of poverty and their profound awareness of working-class problems bringing them respect from their fellow workers.40 They constituted, therefore, a vital linkage between the movement and the rest of the working class and were central to CNT struggles. Of the many activists ‘schooled’ in the athenaeum, Diego ‘Amador’ Franco – later described by Peirats as ‘our prodigal son’ – stands out.41 Born in Barcelona in 1920, he was an apprentice carpenter and had attended evening classes from around the age of eleven, progressing to write both journalism and poetry, for which he revealed much talent. Active in the anarchist youth movement – the Juventudes Libertarias (JJ. LL. – Libertarian Youth) – at the age of thirteen he joined the revolutionary militias during the civil war, after which he fled to France. In 1946, he returned to Spain to revive the clandestine anarchist movement only to be detained and tortured, before being executed a year later, in 1947, aged twenty-seven.42
For all its success, the athenaeum, which depended on financial contributions and donations from its far-from-wealthy supporters, led a precarious existence. Despite this adversity, the organisers were creative: library books were routinely ordered from local publishers, the bills then going ignored.43 Thus they acquired a significant collection of books from the leading publisher Espasa-Calpe, including its celebrated encyclopaedia.44 But most of all it was the tireless labour of Peirats and his group who, no more than twenty strong, worked ‘like devils’ in their spare time to keep the athenaeum alive.45 In Peirats’s case, he gave talks, taught, acted, directed plays, applied make-up to fellow actors, painted stage sets, and even wrote a play. Any surplus generated by the athenaeum’s activities was either used to fund new initiatives or was donated to other causes, such as the CNT Prisoners’ Support Committee, which took care of social prisoners and their families. The organisers expected no personal gain other than the satisfaction of participating in a work of collective creation.46 Peirats was deeply enamoured with a forum that allowed him to give full vent to his cultural and aesthetic energies, particularly his love of theatre and song.47 In this sense, as a form of cultural activism grounded in everyday life, the athenaeum allowed him to live out his desires. Within the obvious constraints imposed by work commitments, he could live anarchically while cultivating alternative cultural visions in opposition to the mainstream in ways that presaged later developments in post-World War II Beat and libertarian countercultures. This was much in keeping with his revolutionary goals and his belief that the building blocks for future mobilisations had to be rooted in neighbourhood activism. Rather than seeing revolution in simple insurrectionary terms, for José it was a socio-cultural process rooted in attitudinal change. He was then a cultural missionary, attempting to consciously transform his local environment, along with the collective experience of those around him. As a result, the athenaeum was a communitarian experiment that generated new socio-cultural practices; it advanced a non-hierarchical way of life, part of a bid to fashion a new everyday life based on new emotions and values rooted in human self-expression and cooperation.
Through the athenaeum, Peirats became known locally as a ‘conscious worker’, one of ‘those with ideas’ who, through their own individual self-determination and personal conduct, set an example to those around him.48 Therefore, he now rejected ‘vices’ such as gambling and smoking and, unlike in his teenage years, he prided himself on rarely imbibing alcohol. While this may have been personally gratifying for Peirats, there is a sense in which his intense activism possibly impeded him from developing intimate relationships with the opposite sex. While his social activities provided him with interpersonal skills that enabled him to develop relationships with males and females of varying ages (‘quite a few girls’ attended the athenaeum in La Torrassa49), his autobiographical writings reveal a degree of timidity that resulted in
