and periodically led to confrontations and arrests. At his union centre, José was directed to a bakery whose owner had a reputation for hostility towards the CNT. He duly entered the bakery and casually set to work, explaining to the employer and his wife, to their consternation, that the CNT had sent him. Tellingly, the couple were impressed by Peirats’s good humour and hard work and invited him back. This work experience proved invaluable and, ironically, he ended up getting some more baking work in the kitchen of the Modelo prison.61 Peirats could just as easily have been a detainee there, for just a few weeks after becoming a baker, he initiated what he later described sanguinely as ‘a chapter in my life as a terrorist’.62 This was part of a struggle by CNT bakers to achieve their historic demand: the abolition of night work and a 5 a.m. start that would allow them to spend the night at home and shake off their ‘death’s heads’ (caps de mort) nickname.63
The bakers also had health and safety demands, since ‘90 per cent of the bakeries were disgusting underground rooms, humid and replete with cockroaches and rats.’ When employers resisted, the union established a ‘war committee’ (comité de guerra). José duly volunteered and, along with other younger bakers, was at the forefront of the conflict. There followed a series of small bomb attacks on bakeries before the employers’ association accepted the CNT’s demands, excluding the need for a strike. Yet some employers refused to accept the deal and victimised the activists. When the union boycotts of these bakeries proved unsuccessful, militants resolved to give them a ‘fright’ (susto). Armed with pistols, Peirats and a comrade visited one employer who had victimised CNT bakers to ‘persuade’ him to change tack. On another occasion, he and a couple of comrades bombed a bakery, making their escape after a brief exchange of gunfire with security guards from a nearby factory.64 Such was the aggressive stance of L’Hospitalet bakers that local employers complained to the authorities about the spiral of violence.65
Peirats’s activism also centred on his new affinity group, known simply as Afinidad. Formed around the time the Rationalist Athenaeum opened in 1931, this ‘propapaganda and action group’ included his brickmaker friend Canela, as well as other like-minded young anarchists, male and female, who had met in local athenaeums and rationalist schools. Totalling around fifteen members, Afinidad, like all such groups, was rooted in strong neighbourhood and personal relationships; for instance, there were three couples in the group. Among the group was Pérez, a pistol-wielding youth, not ‘one to mess with’, who was a close friend of Peirats and his family, for whom he was ‘like another son’. In terms of orientation, the group conjoined a variety of activist approaches: some members were more anarcho-syndicalist and others dedicated themselves to cultural activities through the athenaeum; some rejected violence entirely, while a subgroup – which included Canela, Pérez, and José – ‘accepted everything’. As we will see, this was not always the case, and they mainly dedicated themselves to acts of sabotage during strikes. While it is understandable that José was somewhat guarded about the group’s specific actions, he did refer to what was perhaps its most spectacular action, the collapse of electricity lines outside L’Hospitalet during a general strike.66
By 1932, José was, as he subsequently described himself, ‘a kind of wannabe intellectual [intelectualillo] and premature terrorist [terrorista en agraz]’. His activism shifted according to the changing fortunes of the movement, operating publicly when possible, yet ready to step forward to defend the CNT using all necessary means. In his case, this was made easier since at this time he was yet unknown to the police, so he felt comfortable keeping a small arsenal in his room at home. As he reflected years later, not without humour and possibly with a degree of exaggeration: ‘My mother couldn’t open one of my drawers without shrieking at finding a grenade or a couple of pistols.’67
While it is clear that young Peirats had a penchant for violent struggle, in keeping with his commitment to anarcho-syndicalist practice, these armed activities were intimately linked with concrete, day-to-day union struggles and the moral certainty that they would improve the lot of his fellow workers. The same cannot be said of the three insurrections organised by the radicals during the republican years. While these uprisings tapped the growing disenchantment of the dispossessed with the Republic, Peirats was fiercely critical of them due to their wholly negative consequences for his beloved CNT.68
3.4 The cycle of insurrections’:
Internal schism and demoralisation
The first uprising occurred in January 1932 in Alt Llobregat, an isolated mining district in northern Catalonia. Localised and easily contained by the army, the authorities used the insurrection as a pretext to deport over 100 revolutionaries from across Spain to the Canary Islands and Spanish territories in Saharan Africa.69 Among the deportees were Durruti and Ascaso, probably the two most high-profile advocates of the maximalist position, and Canela, Peirats’s closest friend and comrade in Afinidad.70 Although Canela did not participate in the uprising, he had a police record and had been detained on several occasions since the birth of the Republic, which meant the authorities were happy to get him off the streets.71 Peirats’s love for his friend was channelled into a righteous indignation against both what he saw as the ‘authoritarian’ republican state and the fruitless insurrectionary tactic.
The fallout of the rising and the deportations brought tensions between the CNT’s rival factions to a head. Although the moderates had no prior knowledge of the insurrection, the radicals berated them for not supporting the movement; meanwhile, the moderates criticised what they saw as the radicals’ reckless adventurism. The gulf between the two factions was exacerbated by the vendetta of the Montseny family towards the moderates, led by some of the Barcelona cenetistas who, during the dictatorship, as mentioned above, had questioned their authority to collect money in the name of social prisoners as unaccountable middle-class publicists. The charge was led by Federica, whose contempt for anarcho-syndicalism was such that she joined the CNT only in 1931. Known disparagingly among her critics as ‘Miss FAI’, Montseny directed her ire against the union moderates in family publications, such as La Revista Blanca and El Luchador, creating the climate for the most serious split in the union’s twenty-year history.72 As we will see, this conflict between proletarian, autodidacts, and middle-class intellectuals would be repeated later during the civil war and in exile, when Peirats frequently crossed swords with Montseny.
In what was the first but not last CNT schism that José would witness, one might be forgiven for assuming he would be an unconditional supporter of the radical position. His temperament, his style of activism, his youth, and his experiences in La Torrassa, where the moderates had few supporters, all inclined him towards the radicals, as did his friendship with Canela, who had introduced him to Ascaso, one of the leading advocates of the insurrectionary line.73 Likewise, Peirats’s first pamphlet, Glosas anárquicas (Interpretación anarquista de la historia), was a contribution to the movement’s internal debates at this time and constituted a sustained attack on the ‘organised’ trade unionism of French theoretician Pierre Besnard, then de rigueur with moderates like Pestaña.74 Although we cannot be certain of its publication date, Glosas anárquicas probably appeared in late 1931 or early 1932, when Peirats was twenty-four, and he revealed great sympathy for Hispano-Argentinian Abad de Santillán’s idea of an exclusively anarchist workers’ movement, which guided many of the radicals and the FAI.75 Yet he also outlined his conviction that a future revolution hinged on ‘educational propaganda and incitements to individual perfection’, through which ‘we can heat up the atmosphere while we educate the people in a revolutionary fashion, raising its cultural baggage.’ This led him to criticise ‘theatrical conspiracies’, which he saw as ‘irreconcilable with our libertarian principles’.76
While Peirats’s activism deepened after the CNT split, he nevertheless refined his position. By mid-1933, when it was manifest that the pursuit of an anarchist workers’ movement had provided justification for a split and the expulsion of revolutionary syndicalists and anarcho-syndicalists from the CNT, he rejected the idea of ideological purity in the unions.77 With hindsight, he appreciated how the moderates ‘saw things more clearly’ when it came to the need for revolutionary organisation, even if they committed ‘the
