Chris Ealham

Jose Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement

Living Anarchism

This book investigates urban conflict, popular protest and social control in Barcelona during the period 1898-1937. Focusing upon the sources of anarchist power in the city and the role of the organised anarchist movement during the Second Republic the volume concludes with an analysis of the decline of the power of the anarchist movement during the civil war in its identification of the local conditions that made Barcelona into the capital of European anarchism.

Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898-1937

A study of one man and a collective biography of the working class into which he was born. The story of José Peirats shows the human foundations of Spanish anarchism, the ties of friendship and community that cemented the largest anti-authoritarian movement in the world. “In his biography of Pierats—anarchist, autodidact, brick maker and historian—Chris Ealham presents us with an unsettling portrayal of that most challenging and complex organization, the CNT-FAI, both in its greatest moments and in the agony and brutality of its exile. Commanding the narrative throughout, though, is Peirats. José Peirats both helped make history as a militant anarchist, sometimes with gun in hand, and wrote some of the most detailed and determinedly impartial history our movement has ever produced. It is a matter of real satisfaction to know that this exemplary militant and scholar has the biography he deserves.”—Barry Pateman, archivist and author with the Kate Sharpley Library

José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement

Michael Richards

This 2005 book explores the ideas and culture surrounding the cataclysmic civil war that engulfed Spain from 1936 to 1939. It features specially commissioned articles from leading historians in Spain, Britain and the US which examine the complex interaction of national and local factors, contributing to the shape and course of the war. They argue that the 'splintering of Spain' resulted from the myriad cultural cleavages of society in the 1930s that are investigated here at both local and national levels. Thus, this book tends to see the civil war less as a single great conflict between two easily identifiable sets of ideas, social classes or ways of life than historians have previously done. The Spanish tragedy, at the level of everyday life, was shaped by many tensions, both those that were formally political and those that were to do with people's perceptions and understanding of the society around them.

Chris Ealham

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