Excerpts from ANARCHISTS IN THE SPANISH REVOLUTION by José Pierats #5

In 1892 a peasant uprising took place in Jerez de la Frontera. More than 4,000 peasants took over the city, shouting "Long Live Anarchy!"

The peasant rebellion of '92 was the act of dreamers. Armed with staves and scythes they thought they would overcome the wen guarded lords of Jerez who lived off lands they never even saw, while those who worked the lands could hardly eat.

Blasco lbáñez has written of this episode in his novel, La Bodega. The anarchist apostle of Andalusia, Fermin Salvochea, was in the Cadiz prison at the time of the events, but he was still held responsible for the uprising and condemned to twelve years imprisonment. (The prosecutor demanded 52 years.) Four men were condemned and executed. Eighteen other defendants were sentenced to heavy terms, some of them for life. They, too, were given amnesty at the beginning of this century.

The end of the century in Spain was punctuated by explosions of anarchist dynamite. In Barcelona on September 24, 11892, Paulino Pallás threw a bomb at General Martinez Campos, one of the architects of the Restoration. Pallás acted in retaliation for the Jerez executions. When Pallás in turn was executed, another anarchist, Santiago Salvador, tried to avenge him by throwing another bomb, this time into the orchestra section of the Lyceum, a patrician theatre in Barcelona, on November 8, 1892. Twenty persons were killed. The police rounded up a number of anarchists and tortured some of them into confessing that they had committed the crime. José Codina, Mariano Cerezuela, José Bernat, Jaime Sogas, José Salvat, and Manuel Archs were condemned to death. In the meantime the police discovered the real culprit, but in spite of his confession they carried out all of the executions.

Manuel Archs, wrote his son a letter shortly before his execution in which he said:

Perhaps tomorrow people will tell you your father was a criminal. Tell them loudly that he was innocent of the crime he was accused of. I hope you will understand and will not despair because of what happened to your father. On the contrary, may my end serve to inspire you to spread far and wide the principles for which I give my life.

Years later Archs' son was assassinated by one of the gangs of gunmen which operated with impunity under the reign of the Generals, Martinez Anido and Arlegui.