Excerpts from ANARCHISTS IN THE SPANISH REVOLUTION by José Pierats #7

Repression and anarchist attacks followed one another well into the twentieth century. In 1898 Spain lost the last vestiges of its overseas empire. Defeated in America and the Pacific, the army decided to colonize Spain itself. Alfonso XIII began his reign by humouring the army. But the liberal press satirized the army's arrogance and in retaliation a group of officers sacked the office of a satirical newspaper in Barcelona. The government gave in to military pressure and promulgated the Law of Jurisdictions. By this law any offence, verbal or written, against military institutions would be judged by the military code. In newspapers and public meetings the workers' movement protested this extension of martial law to the civilian sector. The king continued to cultivate the army's favour.

In 1906 the anarchist Mateo Morral broke up the royal wedding by throwing a bomb as the royal couple passed. The king and queen were unhurt, and Morral committed suicide. The subsequent repression concentrated on Francisco Ferrer, director of the Modern School of Barcelona, where Mateo Morral had been a teacher.

Francisco Ferrer had arrived in Barcelona at the beginning of the century with a respectable fortune inherited from a Frenchwoman who sympathized with his projects. A convinced revolutionary and experienced conspirator, he proposed to advance the revolution on two fronts: on the industrial front by means of the general strike; and on the educational and cultural front with rationalist and positivist teachings. In 1901 he opened the first Modem School in Barcelona with 30 students. His publishing house undertook the translation of the best examples of scientific thinking and modern philosophy. His school was the working class equivalent of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza on the university level. His collaborators included Elisée Reclus, Jean Grave, Pyotr Kropotkin, Charles Malato, and Anselmo Lorenzo. This serious revolutionary movement frightened government officials and the clergy. Ferrer was freed unharmed from his first jailing only with great difficulty. But the clergy and the military did not lose sight of him.

In 1907 the local Barcelona federation, called Solidaridad Obrera (Workers¹ Solidarity), became a regional federation. In October, 1907, there appeared the weekly Solidaridad Obrera, edited by José Prat and Anselmo Lorenzo. In January, 1908, the government of Maura and La Cierva proposed a new law for the repression of terrorism. La Cierva, the Minister of the Interior, began a campaign of provocation in Barcelona to ensure the bill's passage. Bombs went off daily in virtually all parts of town, especially in the meeting places of the Catalan nationalists. Curiously, no one was arrested. The government had prepared a plan to stop, once and for all, the political and social rebirth of Catalonia. A private detective was able to establish the true source of these explosions, implicating the police, the Governor, and the Ministry of the Interior. A provocateur named Juan Rull was paid for his services on the scaffold. The proposed law for the repression of terrorism had to be withdrawn from Parliament because of the concerted opposition of the republicans, Socialists, and anarchists.