as did many of their children) and that his critics were those more than willing to show him up, so he was always very concerned with veracity. To prevent any misrepresentation, he kept copies of all his correspondence. For the same reason, his memoirs are refreshingly candid and reflect his abiding honesty, which, as will be seen in the pages that follow, was one of his core values – something acknowledged by friends and enemies alike. Equally, his memoirs are a very human document. An example is Peirats’s appreciation of adversaries inside the anarchist movement, such as Horacio Prieto or Buenaventura Durruti, with whom he clashed on several occasions. Despite this, he was able to acknowledge the personal qualities of these individuals.
Having read many anarcho-syndicalist memoirs over the years, I was struck by Peirats’s sincerity and commitment to the ‘truth’, even if it was, inevitably, his ‘truth’. This contrasts, for instance, with the overtly apologetic memoirs of some of his generation which are, to quote Julián Casanova, ‘odes to the personal honour’ of their authors.9 Certainly, Peirats was far from unconcerned with his ‘personal honour’, but it is my judgement as a historian that his memoirs are generally earnest, unlike the memoirs of Jacinto Toryho, an adversary of Peirats and prominent supporter of the anarchist movement’s civil war collaboration with the state. Like other collaborationists, Toryho later found it hard to justify the twists and turns of his wartime role, and this is reflected in repeated lapses and lacunae in his testimony. For instance, despite mapping the path of anarchist Popular Frontism, he writes of ‘the incredible co-operation of the CNT’ as if he was entirely removed from the process.10 Besides giving the impression that the Stalinist Partido Comunista de España (PCE – Communist Party of Spain) alone destroyed the 1936 revolution, Toryho also suggests that the only opposition to collaborationism with the state came from foreign anarchists, which, as I demonstrate in Chapter 5, is wildly at variance with the historical record.11 In contrast, when it comes to Peirats’s often bitter discussion of his conflicts with the movement leadership during exile, for all his indignation, his general account is, nonetheless, entirely congruent with the main academic study on this period.12
Peirats employed a peculiar, sui generis form of pagination in his memoir manuscript, dividing it into ‘Volumes’ (Tomos) and ‘Books’ (Libros). Sometimes the pagination returns to 1 at the start of a new ‘book’, other times it is cumulative.13 In footnotes, the memoirs are referred to M(emorias) I(néditas) as T(omo)..., L(ibro)..., followed by the page reference, e.g. MI T. 2, L. III, 77. As regards his correspondence, the letters are cited as, for instance, ‘Letter to...’ or ‘Letter from...’. The full filing system for the Peirats archive is on the IISG website: https://socialhistory.org/en.
Chapter One: A rebel youth
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
—Albert Camus
1.1 La Vall d’Uixó
José Peirats Valls was born on 15 March 1908, in La Vall d’Uixó, in Castelló, the most northern of the three Valencian provinces, immediately south of Catalonia. La Vall was a small village, where the summer sun could send temperatures up to forty degrees.1 Like most of Valencia at this time, La Vall was essentially agrarian, specialising in fruit production for the export market and in the production of hemp. The second child of Teresa Valls Rubert and José Peirats Dupla, José was born into the most impoverished sectors of society. His parents resided in Calvario Street, literally Calvary Street. Colloquially, this meant agony or torment and certainly there would be much of this in José’s early life and, indeed, beyond. While most of the Peirats Valls clan were agricultural labourers, José’s parents worked for most of the year as alpargateros, making espadrilles (alpargatas), the rope-soled shoes popular with urban and rural workers. Even though the travails of alpargateros were less physically demanding than working in the heat of the fields, they were still badly paid. His parents led a poverty-stricken existence and, like many other valldeuxenses, they were obliged to supplement their income by harvesting oranges in Burriana, some twenty-five kilometres away. The harvest was a major local event: José’s parents had met there, and his first memory was of a vast carpet of oranges, when he accompanied his family to Burriana.2
Peirats’s parents had six children, a number not uncommon at this time, when rampant infant mortality rates decimated poor families. Tragedy bore down upon José from a tender age: only he and his elder sister Dolores survived into adulthood; two of their younger siblings dying in La Vall, two more in Barcelona. The worst everyday hardships were offset by strong family and community networks. If someone experienced a spell of unemployment or ill health, working relatives or friends offered support. To a degree, popular reciprocity compensated for the underdeveloped state welfare system and, judging from José’s generally positive recollections of village life, his family was saved the deprivation and hunger experienced by the rural dispossessed of Andalusia.
Still, it would be wrong to paint a bucolic picture of the living conditions of the rural lower classes anywhere in Spain at this time. Castelló was largely bereft of educational provision, and the scale of mass illiteracy, especially among women, was comparable with Andalusia, a region often taken to epitomise cultural backwardness.3 Both José’s parents were semi-illiterate, speaking only Catalan, the first language of valldeuxenses, who, like young José, were blissfully ignorant of Castilian, the official state language. This highlighted the de facto autonomy enjoyed by many villages and the limited reach of the weak central state; indeed, life developed there without any real contact with the state, very much in accordance with the federalist philosophy José later embraced.
La Vall d’Uixó had no history of the dramatic agrarian struggles that electrified the agrarian south. When José was born, the social structure of the village was largely undifferentiated – the population of around 8,500 inhabitants remained static for some decades. The main local divide was the river Uixó, which bisected the settlement and provided water for the more productive farmland in the lower part of the hamlet. Nevertheless, class fissures had begun to inscribe themselves on to these geographical divisions: the lower part (abaix) of the village was home to wealthier tenant farmers that sometimes employed farmhands and day labourers who, for the most part, resided in the upper zone (dalt) and were the Peirats’s neighbours.4 But if village tensions resulted in occasional outbreaks of violence, these were largely related to local or family feuds, rather than deeper social antagonisms.
Yet, new political winds blew into La Vall. José’s grandfather, Sento Valls, was a committed republican and self-proclaimed atheist who, later in life, separated from his wife, something that would have scandalised Catholic opinion and was most likely related to his extramarital liaisons.5 A municipal employee, Sento had a position of responsibility, working as the bell-ringer and bailiff (alguacil). He also ran the town jail, which meant that most of his children, including Teresa, were born in prison – a great irony when we consider José’s later pursuit of the total elimination of repressive institutions, his own spells in jail, and his many visits to incarcerated friends and family members.6 For the times, Sento was a man of considerable culture – he played the flute and composed some poetry – and he exerted a strong moral influence over his children and encouraged their scepticism towards religion.7 His influence was later transmitted to young José by his mother and her brothers, Nelo and Benjamín, who moved beyond their father’s republicanism to embrace anarchism and socialism respectively. Nelo, who emigrated to Barcelona, was a committed anarchist, while Benjamín, who also spent several years in the Catalan capital, helped found the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE – Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) in La Vall and was a leading figure in the village cooperative. Both uncles exerted a profound and enduring influence over the young Peirats, greater even than that of his parents. This was particularly true of Benjamín, an agricultural labourer who adhered to a strict moral code that was, in crucial respects, more anarchist than socialist, and which was rooted in a deep respect for his fellow human beings. José was particularly inspired by Benjamín’s spirit of sacrifice, his unshakeable faith in social progress, and his strict system
