LITMIR.BIZ

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next major CNT activity in which Peirats participated was the May Day rally, the first celebration of the International Workers’ Day that fell barely two weeks after the birth of the Republic. An inevitably emotive gathering, it was all the more poignant since the CNT had chosen to assemble at the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts), its birthplace in 1910. Now, it proved woefully inadequate for what some estimates suggest were 150,000 workers on the streets. The rally was followed by a demonstration over a two-kilometre route through central Barcelona to the recently named Plaza de la República (now Plaça de Sant Jaume), the site of the city’s main official buildings, where the marchers planned to submit a list of demands to the authorities. Peirats was near the front of the demonstration when he witnessed the peaceful march turn violent. As the square brimmed with demonstrators, shots rang out. There was pandemonium, as people fled for safety. In the mêlée, Peirats was swept away by the movement of the crowd and thrown to the ground, with people running and crawling over him. Bodies piled up on top of him and he found it impossible to get up, struggling for breath, while the shooting con­tinued. He was extremely lucky to escape unscathed: one policeman lay dead and two more were wounded, along with ten workers. Once able to get up, he expected to be surrounded by dead bodies. To his amazement, he saw none, just an array of discarded jackets, hats, shoes, and espadrilles, which was opportune as he had lost his and was able to select a pair that fitted him before walking home to L’Hospitalet.10 This would not be the last time that he would escape alive from potentially mortal circumstances.

      The events of that day remain confused. It is certain that there were right-wing gunmen from the Free Unions in the square with the intention of provoking a disturbance. It seems likely that one of their number was identified by a CNT steward, who discharged his weapon, prompting an initial exchange of gunfire. Given the proximity of the Council and Generalitat buildings, the security forces responded, provoking a second, apparently three-way, firefight lasting intermittently for around forty-five minutes, as armed cenetistas took cover in the four corners of the square.11 Another version – which also acknowledges the presence of right-wing provocateurs – suggests that the first shots came from police guarding the Catalan government building.12 It is doubtless, guided by memories of police assassinations of cenetistas in the 1920s, that the situation was defused only with the arrival of soldiers, who were cheered into the square as ‘sons of the people’ and whom, the marchers believed, would not open fire on workers.13

      We can only speculate about the extent of Peirats’s involvement that day. He never admitted to being armed, but it is significant that he was at the vanguard of a militant demonstration headed by armed stewards. Moreover, as we know, Peirats had used firearms in the course of his CNT activities and, as we will see, these activities became more frequent. Years later, he acknowledged that he knew that his local barber from La Torrassa was involved in the gunfight, as he recognised the sound of his Smith and Wesson revolver.14 It is also possible that they went to the demonstration together. Whatever the case, in Peirats’s eyes, the events and their violent denouement confirmed his view that the new authorities would, ineluctably, rely on the same repressive apparatus as the monarchy and the dictatorship had and that it was, therefore, struggle as usual.

      3.2 ‘The university of La Torrassa’

      Behind the noisy street mobilisations, Peirats was one of the thousands of anonymous activists who were busy reorganising the anarchist public sphere that had been largely snuffed out by the dictatorship after 1923. The rapid expansion of this subaltern public sphere after the birth of the Republic reflected the accumulation of social demands in the preceding eight years, when economic, social, and cultural advances had been systematically eroded. The CNT grew vertiginously: by August 1931, it claimed 400,000 members in Catalonia, while the Barcelona CNT announced that it encadred 58 per cent of the city’s workers. Peirats’s Construction Union put its membership at 25,000, while the L’Hospitalet CNT affirmed it organised 9,000 workers out of a total population of 37,650 (almost 24 per cent).15 In fact, since many hospitalenses worked in Barcelona and were affiliated to the CNT there, the total number of cenetistas was far higher.16

      There was also a rapid expansion of athenaeums throughout the Barcelona area. Local workers were desperate for culture and, according to one activist, ‘athenaeum fever’ erupted, due to the craving for knowledge.17 In L’Hospitalet, in 1930, 42.5 per cent of men and 54.1 per cent of women were illiterate, while the figures would have been higher still among La Torrassa’s migrant populace.18 Aware that a people without culture would be less capable of taking control of its destiny, José and his group were determined to disseminate the revolutionary ideas they had refined during the dictatorship and bring culture to this most neglected district. Their efforts helped convert La Torrassa into what one expert describes as ‘one of the most important neighbourhoods in the history of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism’19 or, as La Vanguardia described it, a district with a ‘preponderance’ of ‘extremist elements’.20

      Before the Republic, the local elite that resided in the centre of L’Hospitalet already viewed the residents of La Torrassa with a mixture of suspicion and condescension. The official view was summed up by a pseudo-sociologist who described torrassenses as being ‘badly adjusted and whose children display extremely high levels of crim­inality and parental neglect’.21 With the creation of an autonomous Generalitat government, La Torrassa was demonised as a ‘decata­lanised’ space, labelled ‘Little Murcia’, home to the stereotypical migrant – the ‘backward’ and ‘savage’ ‘uncultured Murcian’.22 Of all the different groups of migrants from across the Spanish state, Murcians were singled out as the source of all Catalonia’s problems, as the middle-class republicans in the Generalitat, like the Catalan bourgeois patricians before them, adopted a colonial-style mentality towards working-class ‘outsiders’. As always with such panics, the reality was more complex: according to the 1930 census, over 50 per cent of hospitalenses were Catalan; migrants from Murcia and Almería constituting just 18 per cent.23 For Peirats, La Torrassa was a place of hope, ‘a compact town, genuinely working-class, and underdeveloped in every sense’,24 for whom the Republic brought no change to the overarching structure of oppression. The August 1931 outbreak of bubonic plague highlighted the official neglect in the area.25

      La Torrassa’s dense network of CNT supporters converted the district into ‘a focal point for social ferment’,26 ‘famous in the sensationalist press for the rebelliousness and the bellicosity of its inhabitants’, and it was here that Peirats focussed much of his activism prior to the civil war.27 He was one of the founders of La Torrassa Rationalist Athenaeum.28 Based in Llançà Street, just a few blocks away from his Collblanc home, the centre was born thanks to the sacrifice of local workers. Peirats and other brickmakers scraped together the rent and deposit for the premises, while carpenters provided desks, chairs, and shelves. Modelled on the Sants Rationalist Athenaeum of his youth, the athenaeum organised evening classes, theatre productions, musical recitals, public talks, and debates and also housed a library. Its meeting rooms were used by local anarchist and neighbourhood groups,29 and along with its supporters, the athenaeum intervened in local community struggles.30

      Peirats invested considerable energy in the athenaeum, and its cultural vision closely resembled his ideas.31 In keeping with the notion that the workers had to grasp universal culture, and in contrast to the ‘proletarian culture’ then de rigueur in Stalinist circles, the library included works by Marxist, bourgeois, and even reactionary authors, along with the anarchist classics. Similarly, speakers from diverse pol­itical tendencies were invited to address the athenaeum, with the only prerequisite that they accept open debate with the audience after their talk.32 Highlighting the activists’ democratic approach to the battle for ideas, on one occasion, a public debate was organised with an extreme conservative cleric. Another promoted activity was hiking, which complemented José’s appreciation of beauty as a counterpoint to a lived environment rendered ugly by capitalist urbanism. Hiking was especially popular with younger workers, who could escape for the day to nearby countryside or beaches. Important in its own right given the absence of affordable commercial forms of leisure, hiking also had vital cultural, political, and pedagogical dimensions: groups might discuss important political questions or a previously agreed text. The activists also organised mass picnics, which attracted entire families, with organised games and learning activities for children, while the adults either just relaxed or participated in debates.33

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