Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

It is commonly accepted that the history of Spanish anarchism started in the early nineteenth century with the economist and social reformer Ramón de la Sagra (1798–1871). In 1845, he launched the first anarchist periodical, El Porvenir , which introduced to Spain the ideas of Proudhon, Fourier , and Saint-Simon . Between 1848 and 1849, de la Sagra and Proudhon founded the Banco Popular. Despite this, the Spanish anarchist movement did not properly get underway until after the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) meeting in London in 1864, when the supporters of Bakunin sent the Italian Giuseppe Fanelli to Spain. His mission was to establish the Spanish section of the First International (Sección Española de la Primera International), which occurred in 1869. The triumph of Bakunin's anarchosyndicalist theories was so great that when Pablo Lafargue arrived in Madrid in 1871 with the intention of founding a workers' political party, he was told by the Catalan statesman Francisco Pi y Margall that a Marxist political party would never succeed in Spain. Francisco Pi y Margall (1824–1901) was one of the most influential thinkers who contributed to the popularization of anarchism in Spain. After emigrating to France in 1866, he came into direct contact with the theories of Proudhon, which he translated and analyzed in various books. He defended the principle of ... log in or subscribe to read full text