by Barry Pateman

As you get older you find yourself doing more and more of these events and it’s quite sad as well as quite heartening in many ways. I remember speaking 20 years ago in Conway Hall, in London, about 50 years after the Spanish Revolution, and it is somewhat haunting to think that that generation of militants are now dead and gone.

So tonight I want to talk about the anarchist resistance to Franco, from 1939 onwards. Before I do that I want to say two or three things, because some of the things I say may sound rather harsh and critical of the CNT (and I’m not really going to talk about anything else apart from anarchism). So if it sounds harsh, it’s simply to try and be realistic. I am not particularly cruel or thoughtless or heartless or smug. It’s very easy for all of us, 70 years onward, to say clever statements about it or think smugly about it or try and use it as a debating point. The truth of the matter is that probably if you look at the 20th century, the anarchists, both in the CNT-FAI and the FIJL (the libertarian youth), and the anarchists who were not involved in those organizations, came nearer to creating a revolutionary change in everyday life than anyone else ever did.

Those years in Aragon, Barcelona, and the Levant were probably the high watermark of possibility. The anarchists involved called it “a living utopia.” They touched something that you and I can only dream about and talk about. They actually did it for awhile. No matter how awkward, how ungainly, they achieved something in their life that you and I are trying to do every day and not achieving. And because they did that, because they changed everything that made up their lives, because they took individual-collective responsibility, and they changed patterns that had been locked into their brains for centuries, and they were aware of the potential in each person that could flourish and grow, we must keep looking at it and we must keep thinking about it. Spain isn’t going to go away, and we’ll always return to it as anarchists, thinking about what we can learn and what we can do to make what they did real. And I for one, would very much like it to be real, rather than some intellectual ideal, or something to talk about over three pints of bitter.

When the Civil War/Revolution ended, there were two main areas where the anarchists moved to: France and from France to Mexico. And it’s those militants who stayed in France that I want to talk about today. They settled there and were repatriated into concentration camps, both in France and in North Africa. Conditions were horrendous. Many of them broke out, but within the camps themselves they also began to reorganize the CNT, to try and bring it back to life, to keep it going not only for those in the camps but for the militants who hadn’t left Spain; they tried to revive it in Spain. You must remember the CNT had always been persecuted; the CNT had had periods of being underground, so it wasn’t a totally new experience— though this was a far more brutal underground than they’d ever had before. And what they did was to carry the problems that the CNT had not been able to deal with into those camps and into exile.

By the way, we would be foolish to underestimate the psychological effects of exile. There is an enormously potent story by Ethel Mannin, the British novelist, called Refugees. Ethel Mannin had spoken on the same platform as Emma Goldman in London and had supported the CNT-FAI, and one of the sentences that you read in that story, it’s haunting. Rodriguez, one of the militants, says, “Our days which had been so full, so full and busy, were now just empty,” as they sat in the cold English suburb with nothing to do and nowhere to go but just to sit and talk and talk. And that effect in itself was brutal.

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