Foundations of Anarchist Militarism

The romanticisation of war, the lionisation of combatants and the promotion of warrior virtues may seem antithetical to anarchist ideology but, in many ways, it reflected the ambiguous legacy of nineteenth-century European attitudes towards war. Many anarchists absorbed the enlightenment yearning for universal peace but retained an eminently romantic view of popular insurgency, said to be in the ‘intellectual, moral and even the material interests of the populace,’ according to Bakunin.Footnote ¹² The founder of anarchist mutualism, Joseph Pierre Proudhon, while condemning the tyranny and avarice driving nineteenth-century wars of conquest, nonetheless praised the creative impact of war as ‘a divine fact’ whose antagonisms had educated and matured humankind culturally, economically, and socially.Footnote ¹³ The intellectual hinterland from which Spanish anarchism emerged was thus caught between a rejection of war as an instrument of the state and a reverence for the creative potential of popular violence.

The former sentiment found many sympathetic ears among Spain's labouring classes who, thanks to the corrupt quinta (draft) system, disproportionately paid the ‘blood contributions’ for colonial wars in the late-nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴ The army's participation in repressive measures against communal mobilisations (such as during the Tragic Week insurrection of 1909) only cemented the Spanish anarchists’ distinctive conception of the military as an invasive presence while their prefigurative ideology provided impetus for young workers to evade the emasculating subordination of conscription, thereby remaining independent of the state's coercion.Footnote ¹⁵ It also added military officers to those subject to violent escalatory reprisals by a minority of militants – pistoleros – who aimed to publicly reply to economic and political injustices, underscore the repression of the state, and ultimately provoke popular insurrection.Footnote ¹⁶ Though frequently at odds with the gradualist and purist factions, the wider movement nonetheless channelled rhetorical and material support to such ‘men of action.’Footnote ¹⁷ These grupistas were largely young, unmarried, unskilled workers with deep familial and social roots in the movement who had been hardened into anti-state violence during the campaign of pistolero violence provoked by the economic hardships which followed the end of the First World War.Footnote ¹⁸ Within these, it was the Nosotros Group (Grupo Nosotros) (whose notable members included Buenaventura Durruti, Juan García Oliver, Francisco and Domingo Ascaso, Miguel García Vivancos, and Ricardo Sanz) which possessed the most radical insurrectionary ideology. Described by Chris Ealham as having an ‘essentially military’ conception of revolutionary strategy, Nosotros – to the chagrin of the intellectual grandees within the movement's ideological body, the Iberian Anarchist Federation (Federación Anarquista Ibérica; FAI) – discarded the need for an organised mass movement as a prerequisite to revolution, calling for power to be seized by a cohesive force of experienced fighters.Footnote ¹⁹

In June 1936, alert to the imminent coup-d’état being organised within the Spanish officer corps, the Grupo Nosotros brought their proposals before the Plenum of Anarchist Groups in Barcelona, pressing the case for creating a clandestine ‘revolutionary army’ from the CNT's network of defence committees that would be capable of harnessing the violent potential of the masses. ‘Armed force must be in the anarchists’ hands,’ maintained García Oliver, ‘lest it fall into the clutches of others.’ Strikingly, an unnamed member of the group made what would become a commonplace appeal to masculinity and pragmatism during the Civil War: ‘[the anarchists] had to be men. The time had come for action and daring.’Footnote ²⁰ Although some voices were raised in support, much derision and outright hostility was apparent, encapsulated by none other than Cipriano Mera's heckling voice: ‘Maybe comrades Ascaso and García Oliver could let us know what colour of general's braid they would like?’Footnote ²¹ Yet if such ideas were a minority among the FAI, they had echoes within the larger anarcho-syndicalist milieu of the CNT. The resolutions of the Zaragoza Congress in May 1936 had such a form of revolutionary warfare plainly in view:

Indeed, strident military themes had been expressed within the CNT's discourses during the elections of February 1936, when its National Committee demanded ‘a war footing’, declaring that democracy had ‘no place on the field of battle.’Footnote ²³ This reflected the antifascist ‘war culture’ of interwar Europe, a militarising process common to the political left and right, and particularly their youth wings, which transformed urban public spaces into sites of violent contestation.Footnote ²⁴ Where physical force was absent, aggressive discourses diffused through print and visual culture clamoured for the eradication of opponents as a prerequisite for a new social order rooted in revolutionary masculine vitalism.Footnote ²⁵ For the anarchists, and for the majority of Spain's antifascist left, such declarations helped to solidify the expectation of impending battle between the armed masses and the forces of reaction, a sensibility which laid the foundations for the FAI's ‘men of action’ to define the direction of the movement.Footnote ²⁶

This process of redefinition began with the representations of the July Revolution and the formation of militia columns to defend the new order. The attempted coup led by a group of nationalist military officers from 17–19 July 1936 secured much of northwest Spain but met fierce resistance by groups of armed workers in many urban centres. In Barcelona, the CNT Defence Committees, forewarned of the rising through their informants and reinforced by local Republican security forces, rapidly seized arms and defeated the military columns attempting to converge on the city centre, before storming the military holdouts in the Sant Andreu Armoury and Atarazanas Barracks, actions that became the defining symbols of the July Revolution.Footnote ²⁷ In the following days, the rallying cry of ‘To Zaragoza!’ swept through the victorious anarchist militants, a move backed by Durruti, the hero of the Atarazanas, and the newly-formed Central Committee of Antifascist Militias which set about converting the Defence Committees into a militia force to recapture Aragon from the military rebels.Footnote ²⁸ The anarchist press breathlessly recorded ‘the virile and Olympian epic’ of these militants who were now ‘a great Popular Army’ which would ‘allow us to chase and sweep [the rebels] off the face of the Peninsula.’Footnote ²⁹ The columns advancing across Aragon, the Levante and towards the Guadarrama Mountains were construed as instruments of revolutionary providence, hailed and embraced as ‘liberators’ and ‘saviours’ by the population.Footnote ³⁰ In anarchist reportage, the columns had already acquired a violent mystique within the movement. Writing of the Francisco Ascaso Column (named for the revolution's most prominent martyr), Land and Freedom (Tierra y Libertad) – the central newspaper of the FAI – praised ‘the cold blood’ of the militiamen: ‘they are hungry for the struggle and for victory. They carry the rifle as something precious.’Footnote ³¹ Having seized these weapons from the mutineers, the rifle was now a potent symbol of the anarchist hegemony in Barcelona, underpinned by their monopoly on violence.Footnote ³²

Open warfare with the Nationalists, moreover, demanded a new and distinctly martial idiom as anarchist leaders assumed military roles, capturing large swathes of territory. In the forefront were the members of the Grupo Nosotros, establishing a template for charismatic military leadership.Footnote ³³ Durruti's star shone brightest among these; even Anarchy (Acracia), a weekly whose editor, José Peirats, had virulently opposed the most radical grupistas, applauded Durruti for speaking ‘the language of the trenches.’Footnote ³⁴ Acracia also proposed offering a ceremonial pistol to the veteran anarchist, paid for by public subscription, in response to a similarly funded ceremonial sword gifted by French nationalists to General José Moscardó Ituarte, the hero of the Siege of the Alcázar.Footnote ³⁵ While the pistol was an established anarchist symbol, its competitive positioning here gave it an inescapable martial quality, equating Durruti's military status with that of Moscardó.Footnote ³⁶ This illustrates an important aspect of the militarisation of anarchism's print culture. While salutes and decorations were commonly abhorred by anarchist militants, engaging the Nationalists in combat required that they partially replicate their opponents’ symbolic language of charismatic-warrior heroism, if only to emphasise the superiority of their own warrior leaders.Footnote ³⁷

While this triumphalism persisted, cracks began to appear in the façade of the supposedly invincible columns, prompting a crisis of confidence among many anarchist leaders. By late August, the ‘human ant-hill’ which had departed Barcelona mustered only 35,000 men (organised in units rarely in excess of 2,000) scattered across the 250-mile-long Aragon Front.Footnote ³⁸ The tactical shortcomings of most antifascist militias were made obvious during the summer and autumn of 1936 by their scattering at the sight of aircraft, failures of operational co-ordination, and the lack of a unified military command structure.Footnote ³⁹ Many anarchists rejected the advice of loyal military officers (referred to dismissively as ‘technical advisors'), surmising that their proposals were outdated bourgeois conventions rather than practical measures. In his memoirs, Mera recorded an early confrontation with Colonel Francisco del Rosal when the Republican officer found that his militiamen had retired from their positions in the Guadarrama Mountains without digging trenches: ‘We are the FAI, and we don't need parapets,’ Mera retorted, ‘For us, it is a question of always going forward.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Military experience, however, was a hard teacher: by September the columns had failed to secure the urban centres of Huesca, Teruel and, most significantly, the anarchist stronghold of Zaragoza.Footnote ⁴¹ The celebrated Balearic expedition organised by the Council of Catalan Antifascist Militias collapsed amid sectarian distrust and the refusal of anarchists to obey orders unsanctioned by the National Committee.Footnote ⁴² For some, the intensity of the conflict prompted a volte face on their hostility to established military practices. After a chance mortar shell claimed the lives of two of his grupista comrades in the Battle of the Somosierra, Mera concluded that the anarchists’ ‘revolutionary self-discipline’ was insufficient to meet the demands of modern warfare: ‘We found ourselves at war, and we could not play at war without the grave risk of paying irreparable consequences.’Footnote ⁴³ The military failure of the romanticised militia columns and the transition towards modern positional warfare created a striking pragmatism among even outspoken antimilitarists like Mera, yet reverence for fighting men persisted and ultimately facilitated a dramatic transformation in the cultural repertoire of Spanish anarchism as it sought to represent its militants as both heroic and effective on the modern battlefield.

The Impact of the Battle of Madrid

The Battle of Madrid has justifiably been called ‘the forcing house of anarchist pragmatism,’ imposing fresh compromises on the movement after four of its leaders joined Largo Caballero's government as the Republic desperately sought to counter the rapid advance of Franco's Army of Africa from the south-west.Footnote ⁴⁴ Simultaneously, however, Madrid served as an opportunity for the movement to appropriate and instrumentalise the language of antifascist warfare through the participation of its affiliates on a modern battlefield. The most symbolically important display of this rearticulation came on 11 November 1936, with the arrival of a CNT militia column from the Aragon Front led by Durruti, an event immortalised in anarchist print culture. One improbable rendering from a 1937 edition of Libertad recorded how emissaries from Madrid arrived at the Durruti Column's headquarters to plead directly for aid: ‘The fate of Madrid, and the war, is in your hands.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Durruti's 4,000 strong column was, in the words of Workers’ Solidarity (Solidaridad Obrera), ‘composed of ideal men, anxious to fight without rest,’ whose ‘impetuous momentum [….] is the essential factor for victory.’Footnote ⁴⁶ The flight of Caballero's government on 6 November, while disgracing the four complicit CNT ministers, had also saved Durruti's men from appearing to be defending the state; rather they were joining the people in arms – ‘in the streets of Madrid there remain only the heroes, the workers.’Footnote ⁴⁷ The CNT's regional press rallied around this symbol, exhorting their members to go on the offensive in solidarity and to transform loyalist Spain ‘into a giant Madrid.’Footnote ⁴⁸ This form of popular warfare provided an acceptable narrative for the militarisation of the militias; the Popular Army being formed in Madrid was channelling the spontaneous mobilisation of the people against the fascist invader and was a testament to their creative, revolutionary potential.Footnote ⁴⁹ Within this paradigm, the central anarchist press constructed their militiamen as a force of veterans (‘courageous, battle-hardened and disciplined’) whose very presence was sufficient to drive the enemy into flight.Footnote ⁵⁰

CNT forces – including many prominent militants – had endured heavy casualties while fighting the enemy to a standstill in the university city and the trenches of the Casa de Campo.Footnote ⁵¹ Conceptualising these grievous battlefield losses required that the anarchists expand their definitions of martyrdom within the press to give meaning to these seemingly arbitrary blows. Martyrs had long been a part of anarchism's symbolic repertoire stretching back to the Paris Commune (1871) and the Black Hand Affair (1872–3), yet this form of commemoration had been broadly bestowed on the victims of the state rather than leaders on a modern battlefield.Footnote ⁵² The July Days had provided a distinctly military martyrology visible in Barcelona through the newly designated Squares of the Unknown Miltiaman and Captain Biardeau (a Republican martyr of the Bienio Negro – the period of conservative government from November 1933 to February 1936), as well as the memorialisation of Francisco Ascaso's place of death during the assault on the Atarazanas barracks.Footnote ⁵³ Representations of the Battle of Madrid carried this theme still further, hailing the ‘tank-hunter’ Antonio Coll, a sailor killed after disabling four Nationalist tanks in the street-fighting for Carabanchel.Footnote ⁵⁴ Recent research suggests Coll may have been a propaganda invention inspired by the Soviet war film ‘We Are from Kronstadt’ being screened to militiamen in Madrid, which even contained a scene of a lone soldier disabling a tank.Footnote ⁵⁵ Despite this provenance, both the regional anarchist journal Libertarian Front (Frente Libertario) (which claimed Coll was a CNT affiliate) and the national anarchist dailies joined other Republican newspapers in portraying this act as a turning point in the city's defence, after which ‘[t]he tanks lose all their effectiveness . . . The militiamen wait for them calm, confident and smiling.’Footnote ⁵⁶ Despite the Soviet connection, Lisa Kirschenbaum aptly situates Coll within a broader antifascist reverence for the ‘larger-than-life masculinity’ being depicted which allowed international archetypes to acquire new resonance in the Spanish cultural context.Footnote ⁵⁷ Local anarchists were therefore able to claim Coll as a ‘symbol and example’, a call for the wider membership to present their masculinity and antifascist credentials through acts of martial courage.Footnote ⁵⁸ Coll constituted a milestone in anarchist heroic representations; not only was military sacrifice revered, but anarchists were instrumentalising a symbol common to the Republican coalition: the antifascist combatant.

If Coll was the first example of an explicitly military martyr idolised by many sections of the anarchist movement, the posthumous cult of Durruti took this novel archetype to new heights.Footnote ⁵⁹ Killed in suspicious circumstances on 19 November 1936, Durruti's death was retold by the CNT leadership as one of falling at the head of his troops.Footnote ⁶⁰ ‘Generals like Durruti do not die in bed!’ proclaimed the editor of Tierra y Libertad, Diego Abad de Santillán, praising him as the ‘authentic representation of the people's war against fascism.’Footnote ⁶¹ Drawing on Spanish anarchism's established reverence for classical and mythical heroes, other writers proclaimed him a ‘Hercules’ or ‘our Siegfried.’Footnote ⁶² Most striking, however, were the efforts to incorporate Durruti into nationalistic discourses as the incarnation of Spain's warrior traditions stretching back to El Cid and the conquistadors Hernan Cortés, Diego de Almagro and Vasco Núñez de Balboa, described as ‘men of the people’ whose political and military genius spoke to ‘the qualities of a great race.’Footnote ⁶³ While such nationalistic discourses ran against the internationalism that had defined much of European anarchism, leading Spanish militants embraced the Popular Front's narrative of the Spanish as an inherently heroic race confronting fascist invasion.Footnote ⁶⁴ Furthermore, Durruti's death provided them with an icon respected across the entirety of antifascist Spain who had provided all anarchists with (a likely fabricated) dictum through which to idolise duty, and above all military duty: ‘we renounce all except victory!’Footnote ⁶⁵

Anarchism's living heroes also witnessed a representational transformation. The death of anarchism's own caudillo – as Durruti was not infrequently dubbed in the press – provided a new paradigm for its military leadership: figures of impeccable anarchist pedigree who were nevertheless committed to discipline and the war-effort.Footnote ⁶⁶ Foremost among these was Cipriano Mera, who had risen to command the Fourteenth Division in November 1936 and later the IV Corps (a force composed of the anarchist militiamen in the Madrid region).Footnote ⁶⁷ Mera's trajectory from a bricklayer to ‘a commander in the popular army’ was regularly invoked in both the national and the regional CNT press, who dubbed him ‘the authentic soldier of the people’ as well as ‘the hero of Brihuega,’ following his rout of the Italian ‘Black Feathers’ Division in March 1937.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet Mera embodied an anarchist variation of charismatic leadership with Frederica Montseny dubbing him ‘a new figure of messianic status . . . immortal blend of Quixote and Sancho . . . mystic and caudillo.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Ricardo Sanz, Durruti's successor as commander of the Twenty-sixth Division (formerly the Durruti Column) was likewise praised in affective terms, with articles describing his ‘iron will’ alongside his ‘sentiment and heart.’Footnote ⁷⁰ Miguel Vivancos, whose military abilities earned him both the respect of the communist commander, Enrique Líster, and command of the Twenty-fifth Division, was also spoken of as a mystic leader: ‘[his men] see in him the companion, then the commander and the friend, to whom love makes discipline magnificent and indispensable.’Footnote ⁷¹ At the same time, he followed Sanz and Mera as a paragon of discipline, telling the periodical Mi Revista:

Emphasising the revolutionary heritage of these militants-turned-soldiers alongside their charismatic leadership as modern caudillos served two functions for the narrative of the higher committees. First, it established a thread of continuity between the pre-war struggles against the state, the heady days of the July Revolution and the ongoing antifascist war of national liberation. Secondly, it allowed the anarchists to mount a mimetic challenge to the charismatic hero-cults established around Spain's communist commanders. In a 1938 interview with the French communist, Simone Tèry, Líster related a similarly emotional connection with his men: ‘I am the Eleventh Division. And even when I am not with them, it is as if I am there.’Footnote ⁷³ The Battle of Madrid and the death of Durruti thus served as a turning point in anarchist commemorative practises. While the image of the people rising to meet fascism and of Durruti falling in the line of fire served as common symbols to the CNT's regional committees, the higher committees (comités superiores) worked through the press to establish new paladins through which to defend their breaches of ideological orthodoxy and counter the growing magnetism of the Spanish Communist Party and its military leaders.

This process of reconciling military and revolutionary ideals was also achieved through dozens of lesser caudillos, presented to the wartime anarchist movement from late 1936 onwards. These figures were explicitly designated as anarchists; Julio Rodríguez, a hardened militant, was openly described in Tierra y Libertad as having received two death sentences prior to the war and now commanded the Toledo Battalion which was, Rodríquez boasted, ‘exclusively anarchist.’Footnote ⁷⁴ This duality was expressed at the level of individual character, as embodied in the dinamiter (dinamitero) Batista on the Aragon front: ‘an inimitable fortress, and . . . a complete anarchist. So much so, that we do not know which of his two qualities is greater; that of an anarchist or a warrior.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Dinamiteros – specialised raiding units wielding improvised hand grenades – were not exclusively affiliated to the anarchists but the battlefield conduct of these ‘Heroes of the Holy Dynamite’ captured the imagination of their regional and national press, producing improbable accounts of the dinamiteros’ decisive interventions in the urban warfare at Madrid and Teruel.Footnote ⁷⁶ As the descendants of the dynamite-hurling miners of the Asturian Revolution (1934), these military specialists were also a symbolic link connecting the Popular Army to a deeper proletarian heritage.Footnote ⁷⁷ Their very tactics, which consisted of sudden raids on enemy positions, seemed to mirror the pistoleros’ small group violence while their humility and abnegation attested to their continued faith in the ideal: ‘They refused to give their names,’ reported one correspondent after witnessing them in action, ‘saying only that they were anarchists.’Footnote ⁷⁸ This brand of unpretentious, proletarian heroism was explained in opposition to the communist concept of ‘Stakhanovism’, that is, the allocation of privileges to the ultra-productive.Footnote ⁷⁹ The confederal dinamitero, by contrast, did not require such ‘petit bourgeois’ inducements since he had conducted himself in this manner ‘all his life.’Footnote ⁸⁰ In this way, the anarchists’ armed affiliates became both an elite caste within the Popular Army and the carriers of the insurrectionary traditions of the movement's revolutionary golden age.

It has been claimed that, by as early as December 1936, images of the anarchist warrior-hero were ultimately replaced by those of ‘the politician and the office-holder’ in response to the movement's integration into the modernising processes of the Republican war effort.Footnote ⁸¹ This was particularly visible in the National Committee's efforts to discourage the exaltation of Durruti as a revolutionary martyr by the Friends of Durruti group, who instrumentalised his image and example in their campaign against anarchist collaborationism.Footnote ⁸² Yet military hagiographies did not disappear within anarchism's wartime culture; rather they were transformed to better identify their militants and affiliates with the hitherto unfamiliar military roles demanded by the Civil War. While Durruti and the militia columns were consigned to the status of a glorious pre-history which sanctified the movement's participation in the war-effort, this did nothing to mitigate the expanding number of military heroes cited in the pages of Workers' Solidarity (Solidaridad Obrera), Tierra y Libertad and the regional newspapers.Footnote ⁸³ Some of these still evoked a romantic vision of the struggle, such as ‘the cavalry officer, Miguel Arcas, who raised a company of 200 horsemen in Andalucia and undertook a number of daring missions to resupply isolated villages in the Province of Malaga prior to its conquest in February 1937.Footnote ⁸⁴ Many more, however, exhibited the full range of technical and organisational tasks required by a modern army with lionising accounts of artillerymen, engineers, stretcher bearers and despatch riders (evocatively dubbed ‘steel centaurs’).Footnote ⁸⁵ Consequently, the anarchists’ wartime pantheon became a space in which anarchist standards of individual heroism were rearticulated in an overtly martial direction.

Disciplining the Organisation

While such narratives portrayed the process of militarisation as essentially natural and smooth, the adoption of more conventional military practices had opened major fissures within the anarchist movement, exhibited through the intense debates at the Plenum of the Confederal Columns on 5 February 1937. The most contentious question was that of ‘discipline’ and, more specifically, whether the columns should subject themselves to it.Footnote ⁸⁶ Yet the term ‘discipline’, much like the term ‘culture’, possessed evolving and contested meanings within the movement, ranging from an emasculating bourgeois imposition to a pragmatic necessity and an organisational mantra.Footnote ⁸⁷ From 1926, organisational discipline had become a renewed focus within European anarchism after Nestor Makhno and his comrades, reflecting on their defeat by the Red Army, proposed confronting anarchism's perennial lack of cohesion by creating a unified organisation protected by a disciplined, revolutionary, army.Footnote ⁸⁸ Although many libertarians condemned this apparent effort to ‘Bolshevise’ the movement, a number of Spanish anarchists embraced Makhno's model of revolutionary defence through ‘self-disciplined’ guerillas.Footnote ⁸⁹ This critique of conventional military structures was invoked in the summer of 1936 with Solidaridad Obrera announcing ‘We are incapable of blindly complying with the formation of a disciplined army . . . We need to organise freely and we have precedents in our syndical struggles with the bourgeoisie.’Footnote ⁹⁰ A particularly odious aspect for many sections of the movement was the gendered symbolism of military discipline: ‘To be a soldier is to cease to be a man,’ wrote Acracia, ‘hang up their testicles in the barracks [and] resign them to the status of automata.’Footnote ⁹¹ Famously, a member of the Iron Column, a unit that publicly rejected and resisted militarisation, the author penned a series of articles in We (Nosotros), describing any form of martial discipline as tantamount to ‘submission, blind obedience and the obliteration of men's personalities.’Footnote ⁹² These were not merely semantic disputes but rather stemmed from growing unrest among many militiamen at the National Committee's imposition of militarisation upon the anarchist columns in the spring of 1937.Footnote ⁹³

Many other voices, however, argued for discipline as a pragmatic necessity, fit not only for the urgent circumstances of the moment but also compatible with their masculine identities. The Aragonese publication Culture and Action (Cultura y Acción) put it starkly: ‘Reality tells us, in its harsh and cruel language, that without iron discipline there can be no powerful army, and without it there will be no freedom.’Footnote ⁹⁴ CNT Asturias concurred, arguing that ‘before we are anarchists, we are men. Men who live on the earth and not in limbo.’Footnote ⁹⁵ The National Committee stressed the distinction between the bourgeois ‘barracks discipline’ with their concept of ‘war discipline’ which ‘valorises man and drives him towards victory.’Footnote ⁹⁶ Indeed, other militants argued that ‘determination and self-discipline’ had always been displayed by anarchists ‘across the globe’ and hence this military discipline was simply a formalisation of their untarnished ideals.Footnote ⁹⁷ This was complemented by the affective model of leadership outlined above; it was claimed that anarchist officers were obeyed out of respect and confidence they had earned through their pre-war years of insurrectionary struggle.Footnote ⁹⁸ Parades and drills thus became public demonstrations of the anarchists’ organic, but firm, discipline:

Another feature describing the drilling of the Eighty-third Mixed Brigade (a militarised element of the Iron Column) encapsulated what an anarchist correspondent called ‘the spirituality between soldiers and commanders’Footnote ¹⁰⁰:

Discipline, then, was not entirely anathema to the anarchist movement; in the anarchist press it was reconciled at times as a pragmatic measure and, at othertimes, as a distinctively anarchist virtue.Footnote ¹⁰²

One should not exaggerate the spontaneity of these pro-militarisation narratives. They were considerably encouraged and shaped by the National Committee of the CNT who, under General Secretary Mariano Rodríguez Vázquez, sought to make discipline the organising principle of the entire movement. In post-war writing, Vázquez’s emphasis upon discipline, coupled with his premature death in 1940, allowed him to become the scapegoat for the collapse of the Spanish Revolution. His critics, including many who had themselves supported militarisation and antifascist collaboration, accused him of a range of crimes which, in a similar manner to Stalinist modes of condemnation, blended the personal, moral and political together. These included submitting to Negrín (‘the Communist puppet’), smuggling jewels across the French border and being seduced by Russian women in the pay of the Soviet diplomatic mission.Footnote ¹⁰³ Many, though not all, of these claims were unsubstantiated and occasionally accompanied with a strain of anti-Romanyism.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ What is beyond doubt was Vásquez’s absolute commitment to discipline as ‘the know-it-all, the decider-of-all’ in the words of one subordinate.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It was Vázquez who defended militarisation to the anti-statists within Nosotros in April 1937:

For Vázquez, it was organisational discipline on which the very survival of the CNT depended in order to counter the ‘tidal wave of confusion’ resulting from the communists’ aggregation of power.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Through such exhortations, and an aggressive campaign of press centralisation, Vázquez and the National Committee sought to impart this discipline across the entirety of the movement, imposing the austere values of the frontline upon the morally corrupt rear-guard.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Particularly during the strained months of 1938, CNT circulars attempted to transform the syndicates into a disciplined component of the war effort, announcing further recruitment drives, calling explicitly for an end to ‘frivolous spectacles’, and railing against the phenomenon of señoritismo – the presence of young men of fighting age supposedly lounging in cafes behind the lines.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Contempt for these señoritos – a derogatory term for idle, bourgeois young men – was a common sentiment across the movement, expressed in film as well as print. In The Empty Chair (La Silla Vacía) – a documentary feature produced by the Council of Aragon in 1937 – an indolent, callow youth is moved through visions of suffering to volunteer on the Aragon Front, ultimately giving his life in battle and breathing a last appeal to the audience: ‘Men, women, comrades of the rear-guard, think of us!’Footnote ¹¹⁰

Anarchist affiliates and sympathisers were also connected on a daily basis with the frontline through a new species of libertarian journalist – the war correspondent. Prior to the war, reporting had been undertaken by local anarchist militants as one element of their praxis rather than a full-time undertaking.Footnote ¹¹¹ The rapid pace of military events, together with heightened public demand for information, stimulated this new category of reportage from front-line anarchist journalists, including Aurelio Jerez Santa-María, Samuel del Pardo and – most famously – the militant-intellectual, Mauro Bajatierra.Footnote ¹¹² While previous correspondence writing had served to link the disparate local branches with the wider movement, war correspondents connected anarchist affiliates in the rear with a heavily mythologised vision of the frontline. The national newspapers Solidaridad Obrera and Tierra y Libertad; the regional journals Free Men (Hombres Libres, Granada), Acracia (Lerida) and CNT Madrid; and Nosotros ran features by Bajatierra and Santa-María.Footnote ¹¹³ These pieces were generally intimate – if implausible – portraits of individual acts of battlefield heroism, such as a bold raid by a dinamitero known only as El Chino, or of local successes by CNT-FAI units.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Bajatierra earned some degree of celebrity through his reporting, which offered romanticised portraits of military leaders alongside blow-by-blow accounts of the fighting around Madrid, later published as anthologies by the CNT's Office of Press and Propaganda.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In such works, the unique fighting potential of the anarchists was expounded; through their years of insurgency against the state, the anarchists had hardened themselves into ‘a military institution’ in their own right as ‘the descendants of the guerillas of yesteryear.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ Strikingly absent were the questions of militarisation and collaboration; instead the articles presented continuity between the militias and the Popular Army, linked together by the anarchists’ innate heroism and fraternity.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The ubiquity of these accounts provides a powerful indicator of the extent to which military values and symbols became quotidian features of the anarchist cultural landscape, encouraging the wider movement to identify with its affiliates and militants in the Popular Army while erasing the divisions opened by militarisation.

The narrative of the virtuous front set against the corrupt, bourgeois rear-guard also struck a chord across the full spectrum of the anarchist regional press. During the Brunete Offensive (6–25 July 1937) – notably an operation spearheaded by communist-led divisions – Acracia continued to praise ‘the magnificent, revolutionary and combative spirit’ on the Aragon Front while also declaring ‘the entire civil population must live by, and for, war!’Footnote ¹¹⁸ In Granada, Hombres Libres – which had clashed with the National Committee over the imprisonment of its regional paladin, Francisco Maroto – rhapsodised about the ‘generous and noble acts’ which characterised the front in contrast to the ‘shameful and counterrevolutionary spectacle of cafes full of young idlers.’Footnote ¹¹⁹ The Regional Defence Committee of the Madrid area, which successfully resisted the centralisation efforts of the National Committee, similarly portrayed regional anarchist forces as hardened warriors, while also condemning señoritismo and the corrupt, ‘shameful’ capital of Valencia.Footnote ¹²⁰

There was a clear gendered symbolism to such representations. The temptations of the rear-guard were often personified by women, with Acracia denouncing prostitutes as ‘venomous serpents,’ while the widespread use of the mater dolorosa trope established the feminine vulnerability of the urban home-front.Footnote ¹²¹ European anarchism had long expressed a certain puritanism towards sex work while also instrumentalising images of female suffering to underline societal inequity.Footnote ¹²² In many ways, though, this was also a replication of Spanish anarchism's particular constructions of masculinity which, as Richard Cleminson notes, contrasted physical improvement, moral strength and the purity of rural life with the corrupting influences of urban spaces.Footnote ¹²³ Consequently, descriptions of the front often highlighted the combatants’ physicality, with their ‘dark torsos, like animated bronze.’Footnote ¹²⁴ Indeed, common masculinity was considered fundamental to the military identity of the anarchists, with one commissar writing: ‘Every soldier a number? No. Every soldier a man.’Footnote ¹²⁵

The presence of female combatants among the militia columns, albeit in small numbers, posed a major obstacle to this narrative.Footnote ¹²⁶ Despite the protagonism of women in working-class mobilisations (such as the subsistence strikes of 1918–9) and the theoretical embrace of equality in the workplace, the CNT largely ignored the intersections of class and gender subordination while anarchist intellectuals constructed models of gender relations based on their complementary, ‘natural’ distinctions.Footnote ¹²⁷ The advent of war opened greater spaces for women's empowerment and mobilisation, as exhibited in the campaigns for educational access and ‘consciousness raising’ by the autonomous libertarian organisation Free Women (Mujeres Libres), but the broader movement was critical of women usurping ‘masculine’ roles in combat.Footnote ¹²⁸ As a concomitant process to militarisation, the CNT leadership demanded the removal of women from the frontline, re-establishing masculine hegemony over the trenches.Footnote ¹²⁹ Although the image of the militiawoman (miliciana) did not disappear altogether, it was instrumentalised more as a symbol of antifascist victory than as a genuine subversion of gender norms.Footnote ¹³⁰ Patriarchal tropes were not limited to the central leadership but were common to the anticollaborationists; The People's Friend (El Amigo del Pueblo), the newspaper of the dissident Friends of Durruti group, complained of fuel being wasted on taxis for ‘scoundrels and loose women’ in Madrid while fuel shortages persisted at the front.Footnote ¹³¹ Even the newspaper of the vocally autonomous Mujeres Libres largely portrayed combat as a masculine domain in which female participants were notable exceptions.Footnote ¹³² Constructing the front as a space of ideal men thus formed a common touchstone for the movement and created a space in which anarchist ideals and military attributes could co-exist. Although the disciplining process that this derived from certainly responded to the immediate needs of civil war, it was also a manifestation of anarchism's longstanding struggle to maintain ideological purity while recognising the importance of organised force in effecting political change.

The Front and the Rear-guard

Over the course of the war, the virtues of the front received still greater prominence in anarchist culture, reflective not only of the militarisation of Republican society but of the reverence for the creative potential of mass struggle within its revolutionary tradition. This was discernible as early as November 1936, when praiseworthy anarchist conduct and military duty became strikingly interchangeable in the press. Frente Libertario reminded the anarchist soldier-militiaman to conduct himself in an exemplary manner; a demonstration to other antifascists that they were neither ‘primitives’ nor ‘bandits with licenses.’Footnote ¹³³ Apart from their defining capacity for heroism, abnegation and sacrifice, anarchist military formations earned praise for their commitments to development and modernisation. In Aragon, units were reported to have helped to gather in the harvest while in Granada the Maroto Column opened their field hospital to the public.Footnote ¹³⁴ In Huesca, the 141st Mixed Brigade, a reserve unit composed largely of anarchists, distinguished itself by constructing and staffing five schools in villages close to the front, demonstrating their ‘passion for the construction of a new life,’ as phrased by Solidaridad Obrera.Footnote ¹³⁵ The Popular Army was animated by an educating spirit, with substantial resources devoted to the cultural militias (pedagogical teams embedded on the frontline), a project which broadly aligned with anarchism's emphasis on the prefigurative potential of education.Footnote ¹³⁶ The barracks would, consequently, become ‘a school of ideas to make the soldier an enlightened brother, responsible for his actions . . . with a determined revolutionary personality.’Footnote ¹³⁷

Some anarchists not only praised these displays of revolutionary praxis on the frontline but also the ennobling effect of military service upon the individual. In their estimation, the hardships and austerity of military service afforded soldiers the opportunity to purify themselves of the corruption of urban life and embrace a more moral and enlightened condition. El Amigo del Pueblo, many of whose contributors were themselves veterans of the Aragon front, looked to ‘the combatant’ to provide a moral example for the wider movement:

In a more extreme case, one anarchist contributor approvingly quoted Field Marshal Helmut von Moltke: ‘War sustains among men the greatest and noblest feelings – honour and courage – which prevent them from succumbing to the most disgusting materialism.’Footnote ¹³⁹ Journalist Ángel Vásquez Barranco echoed this sentiment, claiming that war provided men ‘full freedom of action to develop intellectually, giving free rein to their true moral and material inclinations . . . the soldier . . . when the war ends, is a completely “perfect” man.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Others claimed the soldier had become the ‘new man’ of anarchism, as Hombres Libres recounted:

Such eulogising was mirrored by a campaign of commemoration sponsored by International Antifascist Solidarity (Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista; SIA), a libertarian aid organisation responsible for a ‘Day of the Combatant’, celebrated on 1 January 1938, in order to mobilise popular support for the front and gather monetary and material donations.Footnote ¹⁴² The image of the wounded veteran (mutilado) as the embodiment of sacrifice also began to proliferate in libertarian publications, including the notoriously autonomous Mujeres Libres.Footnote ¹⁴³

The anarchists’ fixation on virtues of ‘the front’, even among anti-statist publications, reflected the hegemonic symbol of the combatant within the Republican coalition. From the outset, the image of the soldier-militiaman had been a crucial legitimising symbol for all members of the Popular Front.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ By mid-1937, it fed into a Republican campaign of cultural militarisation which saw the innate heroism of the Spanish people and the virtues of the combatant extolled through every public medium, from theatre, to poetry, cinema, and elaborate public exhibitions.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In some cases, this involved the symbolic transfer of front-line values to the rear-guard, as when the Cultural Militia of the Thirty-first Division constructed a replica trench in Barcelona's Plaça de Catalunya in order to stimulate the Republic's ‘collective yearning to win the war.’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Similarly, in November 1938, representatives of the Twenty-sixth Division held an exhibition of their unit's military and cultural achievements in commemoration of the second anniversary of Durruti's death. These included everything from trophies captured from the enemy to ‘the clothes which covered the robust, athletic body of the fierce fighter from León [Durruti].’Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In this respect, both the higher committees and their dissidents were replicating hegemonic Republican cultural symbols, namely the masculine combatant and the virtuous frontline, even while proposing radically different courses of action. Despite these dissenting voices, however, the anarchist leadership was effective in instrumentalising these common motifs towards creating, in its own words, ‘a mighty organisation’ whose legitimacy was assured by the military achievements of anarchists within the Popular Army.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The anarchist soldier, then, became not a walking contradiction but a common symbol of charismatic leadership, revolutionary virtue, masculine identity and the creative potential of armed struggle.