to those critics who fail to see beyond their own sense of privilege and snobbery.4
I do not wish to suggest that Peirats was a perfect individual or that he was a flawless anarchist. Like all human beings, he had his defects, his outbursts of rancour – at times, in debates, he could be abrupt. As an anarchist thinker, he did not evolve massively in the course of his life; for instance, there is little evidence he truly embraced the ‘New Left’ currents of the 1960s. So, while he was a lifelong defender of freedom, his views on homosexuality or feminism did not reflect the growing awareness of distinctive patterns of oppression. Yet, while being critical at times, my aim is not to berate a dead man for this or that foible but to understand what motivated Peirats and how the range of social, personal, political, organisational, cultural, and economic forces shaped and constrained his behaviour and his thinking.
Within Spanish historiography, in recent years biography has been skilfully deployed as a tool of historical enquiry.5 This is to be applauded, for biography, a genre that exists on the frontier of literature and, in some cases, psychology, presents specific challenges for a historian. I do not profess to have transcended these pitfalls, especially since my work on the history of social movements has tended to focus more on collective psychology rather than that of the individual. Yet social history has much to contribute to the older field of biography, since it is clear that life histories and experiences form part of broader histories of social groups. The study of a man like Peirats, whose existence and ideas were so heavily submerged within a movement, provides us, therefore, with an opportunity to move beyond the reconstruction of specific events in the life of an individual in a way that, following the suggestion of Isabel Burdiel and María Cruz Romero, takes into account ‘the reinterpretation of social structures, understood as interactive networks, [and] resituates the role of individuals and their attitudes in the processes of historical change.’6
The chapters that follow, therefore, chart the story of a man who was sucked into the vortex of Spain’s turbulent twentieth century. Chapter 1 addresses the formative childhood influences and family experiences that set Peirats on the road to rebellion and which contributed to mould his later life and world-view. Chapter 2 considers his youthful politicisation: like much of the Generation of ‘36, Peirats was radicalised and politicised during the 1920s dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, becoming an intransigent rebel. Chapters 3 and 4 assess the pre-war Republic, when Peirats came of age as an activist, rebelling against the injustices of Spanish society during the 1930s, channelling his militant energies into the educational, paramilitary, political, and syndical organisations of the libertarian movement. In Chapter 5, we will see Peirats join the rest of the Generation of ’36 to rise up to defeat the military coup of July 1936 and participate in the exhilarating months of revolution, what for the participants was a sublime summer of liberation. This is also the history of a revolution that failed, and we will witness Peirats rallying against those within the anarchist movement that he believed were betraying their ideals and the project of social transformation. The year 1939 and the definitive Francoist triumph in the civil war led to a long winter of obscurantist reaction – a time of defeat, despair, and diaspora as the dictatorship set about cleansing society of Peirats’s insurgent generation, who paid the price for daring to challenge the agrarian and industrial oligarchies in jails, in concentration camps, in exile, and in the grave. This, along with the struggles and divisions of the anarchist movement in exile, is explored in Chapters 6 and 7.
For all the ordinariness in Peirats’s life and the multiple similarities with the life histories of those of his generation, Chapter 8 explores his exceptional work as activist-historian and revolutionary writer, the ‘Herodotus of the CNT’.7 The writings discussed here, and indeed elsewhere in these pages, constitute a commentary on the evolution of the CNT throughout the twentieth century and reveal much about the shifting politics and internal culture of the movement. In exile, it might be argued that Peirats’s writings were an act of resistance against those that the poet Juan Gelman has described as ‘the organisers of oblivion’. Following the post-Francoist democratic transition, Peirats’s labours to document the struggles of the Generation of ‘36 dovetailed with his fight against the condescension and amnesia imposed by the ‘pact of oblivion’ (pacto del olvido) of Spain’s democratic transition in the 1970s, which marginalised the experience of the ‘defeated’ and limited the social horizons and political possibilities for real change. This is discussed in Chapter 9, which covers the final years of Peirats’s life, when, despite his rapidly deteriorating health, he remained actively committed to the defence of liberty, justice, and the recuperation of the voices of the ‘defeated’.
Acknowledgements
This project has been long in the making and many are they who have helped and encouraged me along the way. My demands for information were responded to with great professionalism by the staff at the following archives: the Arxiu Municipal de L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, the Ateneu Enciclopèdic Popular (Barcelona), the Biblioteca Arús (Barcelona), the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (IISG – International Institute of Social History) in Amsterdam, the Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica (Salamanca), and the Institut Municipal d’Història de Barcelona. Saint Louis University (Madrid) awarded me a faculty grant to mine Peirats’s voluminous archive in Amsterdam and gave me study leave to complete the final draft of this book. Julio Aróstegui, Marianne Brull, Agustín Castellano Bueno, Júlia Costa, Freddy Gómez, Pepe Gutiérrez, Dolors Marín, Frank Mintz, David Wingeate Pike, Helenia Roques, Heleno Saña, Scott Soo, and Joan Zambrana were generous with their time and knowledge. I am also grateful to Nick Rider for sharing with me interviews he conducted with anarchists from Peirats’s generation, particularly Concha Pérez Collado, a young anarchist, who knew Peirats. This book has been enhanced greatly by the readiness of friends and comrades of Peirats’s, such as Octavio Alberola, Sara Berenguer, Diego Camacho, Carlos Díaz, and Salvador Gurruchari, to share information about the man and his times. Federico Arcos, one of his closest friends, deserves a special mention for clarifying important episodes and details and for giving me a copy of Peirats’s unpublished memoirs. Both he and Antonia Fontanillas were incredibly generous in providing me with valuable information and documentary material. Gracia Ventura, Peirats’s partner, allowed me several interviews: her hospitality, dynamism, and bonhomie were most welcome and inspirational.
I am indebted to the following friends and colleagues for the encouragement and community they provided at different times while I worked on this project: Manel Aisa, Stuart Christie, Susana Gaona, Eduardo González Calleja, Helen Graham, Kevin Ingram, Andrew Lee, Marcos Ponsa, Andy Price, Maggie Torres Ryan, and Fede Zaragoza Alberich. Dr. Juan Truan Blanco, Spain’s leading specialist in Orthopedic Surgery, who generously assessed material I amassed on Peirats’s medical condition and kindly offered a post-mortem diagnosis based on his expert knowledge. I also wish to thank Zach at AK Press and Luigi Celentano for all his tremendous work during the copy-editing stage. The project has benefitted immensely from the input of Bea, Federico, and Stuart, who commented on earlier chapter drafts. I am especially indebted to my good friend Gareth Stockey, who resisted the rampant individualism prevailing inside the university system to find time to read and offer incisive comments on the entire manuscript. Years ago now, I was lucky to have Paul Preston as my guide when I first aspired to write history, and I was similarly fortunate to receive his trenchant views on an earlier draft of this book. And my biggest debt is to Bea, whose fortitude, baking, and critical encouragement have helped me complete this project. Without the help of the aforementioned, this book would have been far weaker; however, any shortcomings that follow are exclusively my own.
A note on sources: A considerable part of this study is based on the Peirats archive in the IISG in Amsterdam, particularly his voluminous correspondence and his memoirs, De mi paso por la vida – 1,500 pages of autobiographical writing.8 As with any source, the memoirs and letters have been assessed critically. Yet the reader must bear certain things in mind about Peirats. When he wrote most of his letters and his memoirs he had been labelled a ‘thief’ (ladrón) by the leadership of the Spanish anarchist movement in France. He was, therefore, more obsessed than most perhaps with his ‘truth’ and what others thought
