LITMIR.BIZ

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concerns.34

      The athenaeum was an unqualified success and it quickly became an important community institution for all generations, ‘a family home’.35 As Peirats noted proudly, it embellished the everyday life of the dispossessed and, for this reason, ‘we swept the neighbourhood along with us.’36 Weekend plays were particularly well attended, drawing audiences of over 200. Soon, the athenaeum was attracting people from neighbouring Barcelona and it was obliged to relocate to bigger premises in nearby Pujós Street, whereupon its activities were expanded.37 Nevertheless, according to one participant, the new space was, at times, too small for the number of people who attended the most popular functions.38 To evade repression, the activists also operated under the name Amigos del Arte Escénico, which organised theatre and film events right up until the civil war.39

      The majority of L’Hospitalet’s anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist activists passed through the doors of the athenaeum. This played a pivotal role in shaping the culture of the local CNT, and it reaffirmed the essentially proletarian nature of movements whose most prom­inent militants and ‘leaders’ were, like Peirats, invariably working-class autodidacts. Fiercely loyal to the movement that formed them, and unlike the salaried ‘professional revolutionaries’ of the communist parties, these activists remained within the world of labour – their direct experience of poverty and their profound awareness of ­working-class problems bringing them respect from their fellow workers.40 They constituted, therefore, a vital linkage between the movement and the rest of the working class and were central to CNT struggles. Of the many activists ‘schooled’ in the athenaeum, Diego ‘Amador’ Franco – later described by Peirats as ‘our prodigal son’ – stands out.41 Born in Barcelona in 1920, he was an apprentice carpenter and had attended evening classes from around the age of eleven, progressing to write both journalism and poetry, for which he revealed much talent. Active in the anarchist youth movement – the Juventudes Libertarias (JJ. LL. – Libertarian Youth) – at the age of thirteen he joined the revo­lutionary militias during the civil war, after which he fled to France. In 1946, he returned to Spain to revive the clandestine anarchist movement only to be detained and tortured, before being executed a year later, in 1947, aged twenty-seven.42

      For all its success, the athenaeum, which depended on financial contributions and donations from its far-from-wealthy supporters, led a precarious existence. Despite this adversity, the organisers were creative: library books were routinely ordered from local publishers, the bills then going ignored.43 Thus they acquired a significant collection of books from the leading publisher Espasa-Calpe, including its celebrated encyclopaedia.44 But most of all it was the tireless labour of Peirats and his group who, no more than twenty strong, worked ‘like devils’ in their spare time to keep the athenaeum alive.45 In Peirats’s case, he gave talks, taught, acted, directed plays, applied make-up to fellow actors, painted stage sets, and even wrote a play. Any surplus generated by the athenaeum’s activities was either used to fund new initiatives or was donated to other causes, such as the CNT Prisoners’ Support Committee, which took care of social prisoners and their families. The organisers expected no personal gain other than the satisfaction of participating in a work of collective creation.46 Peirats was deeply enamoured with a forum that allowed him to give full vent to his cultural and aesthetic energies, particularly his love of theatre and song.47 In this sense, as a form of cultural activism grounded in everyday life, the athenaeum allowed him to live out his desires. Within the obvious constraints imposed by work commitments, he could live anarchically while cultivating alternative cultural visions in opposition to the mainstream in ways that presaged later developments in post-World War II Beat and libertarian countercultures. This was much in keeping with his revolutionary goals and his belief that the building blocks for future mobilisations had to be rooted in neighbourhood activism. Rather than seeing revolution in simple insurrectionary terms, for José it was a socio-cultural process rooted in attitudinal change. He was then a cultural missionary, attempting to consciously transform his local environment, along with the collective experience of those around him. As a result, the athenaeum was a communitarian experiment that generated new socio-cultural practices; it advanced a non-hierarchical way of life, part of a bid to fashion a new everyday life based on new emotions and values rooted in human self-expression and cooperation.

      Through the athenaeum, Peirats became known locally as a ‘conscious worker’, one of ‘those with ideas’ who, through their own individual self-determination and personal conduct, set an example to those around him.48 Therefore, he now rejected ‘vices’ such as gambling and smoking and, unlike in his teenage years, he prided himself on rarely imbibing alcohol. While this may have been personally gratifying for Peirats, there is a sense in which his intense activism possibly impeded him from developing intimate relationships with the opposite sex. While his social activities provided him with interpersonal skills that enabled him to develop relationships with males and females of varying ages (‘quite a few girls’ attended the athenaeum in La Torrassa49), his autobiographical writings reveal a degree of timidity that resulted in unfulfilled or undeclared loves.50

      In the first year of the Republic, still just twenty-three, Peirats started addressing CNT public meetings. Typifying the CNT’s loosely structured nature, he learnt of his new role as a public speaker walking down a street in La Torrassa, where he saw a poster announcing he was to speak at a meeting. After hurried preparations, he channelled his considerable nerves into a tirade against the republican authorities, which he accused of defrauding the hopes of the people. He concluded defiantly, stating how, despite growing repression, the CNT would vanquish its enemies to ‘forge a new Spain’. Soon, Peirats found himself addressing CNT meetings across provincial Catalonia. Although he never considered public speaking his forte, relying on notes even later in life, he was capable of improvisation, such as when he arrived at Mollet del Vallès, twenty-five kilometres from Barcelona, to find the mayor had banned the meeting. Rather than face a fruitless journey home, he organised an impromptu meeting in the town square, concluding just in time to avoid the security forces.51

      3.3 Radicalisation:

      The ‘man of action’ in the streets

      The clampdown by the authorities on the anarchist public sphere presaged a new stage of social struggle in which Peirats’s status as a man of action was consolidated. Social radicalisation was inseparable from the growing internal struggle within the ‘anarchist family’. The advent of the Republic exacerbated long-standing strategic and tactical fissures between the CNT’s anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist, and more syndicalist-inclined factions over the relationship between revo­lution and democracy. For the anarchist radicals, the way forward was through insurrectionary street mobilisations that would imbue the masses with the confidence to topple capitalism and the state. This contrasted with the syndically-focussed approach of the anarcho-syndicalists, who believed that revolution would come through powerful unions inside the workplace. Meanwhile, the syndicalists, who were grouped around Pestaña and those of his ilk and who had been most affected by state and employer repression, were more concerned with gradual economic improvements and were losing sight of the ultimate revolutionary goals championed by the other two factions.

      These divisions were often described, albeit inaccurately, as a struggle between treintismo and faísmo. The more moderate treintistas took their name from an anti-insurrectionary manifesto signed by thirty prominent cenetistas in August 1931.52 Consisting mainly of older anarcho-syndicalist activists, including Massoni, they believed the Republic offered new opportunities to consolidate CNT structures. The radicals, meanwhile, were incorrectly named after the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI – Iberian Anarchist Federation), the exclusively anarchist secret organisation formed in 1927 to preserve libertarian purity inside the CNT and coordinate the activities of the myriad anarchist affinity groups scattered across Iberia. The FAI would become the great, frequently irrational, fear of the republican authorities. This position was most identified with the Nosotros affinity group, which included Francisco Ascaso, Buenaventura Durruti, and Juan García Oliver, the mythical ‘three musketeers of Spanish anarchism’ who, after World War I, emerged as the prototype for the urban guerrillas that spearheaded the defence of the CNT in the face of spiralling state repression. From the start of the Republic, Nosotros impelled the insurrectionary line, advocating ‘pendular insurrectionary actions’, armed uprisings that would impede the domestication of the proletariat within the ‘parliamentary

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