Anarchist Prisoner Networks in Franco’s Spain and the Forging of the New Left in Europe

For the past half century, a number of stereotypes have framed popular and scholarly representations of the ‘radical sixties’ in Europe, but the Spanish experience confounds most clichés. For decades in the literature, distinctions between the old left and New Left have been dominated by the experience of student and worker radicals in the northern tiers of Europe, where social conflict and protest was sparked by a break with the post-1945 social democratic consensus. Notwithstanding the recent efforts of scholars to shift the focus towards the Mediterranean basin, the experience of the Spanish New Left remains poorly understood. ¹ In Spain, there was of course no redistributive alignment between the state and industry; the labour movement was brutally excluded from the Franco dictatorship's post-1939 state-building process. It was not until the late 1950s when – as a result of Francoism's shotgun marriage between laissez-faire economics and continued military state control – the fragments of the pre-civil-war left would cohere with a new wave of labour protest. Similarly to its northern tier counterparts, the revived labour movement in Spain began to challenge state authority in the streets, in the universities, and on the shop floor. Yet from the end of the 1950s until the pivotal calendar year 1967, the main political vehicle for labour opposition was a group one would ordinarily associate with the old left: the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista de España (PCE)). In this way, the Spanish experience formed a startling contrast to the New Left elsewhere in Europe (both East and West): for while many workers in Spain appeared to pin their hopes for change on the ‘gradualist’ oppositional strategy pursued by the PCE, the rising ‘auteurs’ of the New Left outside of Spain declared that the party was over and returned to the ‘Spanish question’ with a backward gaze.

It was only a few months before the global upheavals of 1968, when the founder of the Situationist International, Guy Debord, referred to the revolutionary syndicalism of Spain's National Confederation of Labour (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT)) as the most ‘advanced model of proletarian power of all time’. ² Yet despite the re-emergence of the workers’ movement in Spain, revolutionary syndicalism ceased to be anything close to an organized force. The CNT, along with the rest of the anarchist movement, now found themselves on the sidelines of labour conflict.

Historians routinely acknowledge the absence of the CNT in the new workers movement of the 1960s, but this acknowledgement has rarely been properly historicized or explained. ³ This has also created the assumption that Spanish anarchists had little to no engagement with the emerging movements of the New Left. Yet far from merely reanimating what other scholars have viewed as the lifeless corpse of Spain's libertarian movement, Debord's statement pointed up a deeply-felt, albeit symbolic, connection between the anarchist generation of 1936 and the revolutionary groups, ideas and currents which would underpin the international rupture of ‘1968’.

This article will indicate how this connection went well beyond wishful re-enactment, by offering a discursive mapping of the little-known but formative networks which developed during the 1960s between anarchist political prisoners in Franco's Spain and emerging activists of the New Left elsewhere in Europe. Faced with the interwoven tensions of decolonization, national liberation, and the ramping up of the Cold War, many radicals elsewhere came to see what Albert Camus once called the deep ‘personal tragedy’ of Spain as unfinished business. Not only was Spain viewed by activists in the northern tiers of Europe as the forgotten casualty of post-1945 arrangements, but also the input of Spain's anarchist prisoners themselves crucially influenced how some New Left activists came to conceive of post-war Europe as a whole. For both groups saw not the consumerist surface of the Franco dictatorship (habitually foregrounded in any discussion of it as a Western client regime), but rather its reconfigured repressive core. These networks reached their fullest realization, I argue, with the birth of the Cruz Negra Internacional (The International Black Cross), an international prisoner support group, founded in 1967–1968 by Scottish anarchist and ex-prisoner of the Franco regime, Stuart Christie.

This ostensibly obscure transnational connection was enabled by a new wave of armed direct action inside Spain, spearheaded by exiled members of the youth section of the CNT, the Juventudes Libertarias. In contrast to the ‘official’ leadership of the CNT in Toulouse, the Libertarian Youth moved away from invoking the legacy of their parents’ tragic defeat in the war of 1936–1939. And instead of commemorating ‘July 1936’, the post-civil-war Juventudes found themselves driven by new revolutionary referents – less libertarian but seemingly more successful – in the example set by anti-colonial struggles, Castro's guerrilla army in Cuba in 1959, and the FLN in Algeria. ⁴ The replication of such guerrilla tactics in Spain would, however, prove a resounding failure, and a series of spectacular (and some not so spectacular) assassination attempts on Franco would turn what was a highly mobile albeit disparate network of anarchists into sedentary prisoners.

Prison was by no means unfamiliar territory for Spain's anarchists, but unlike previous episodes of political struggle, in the 1960s it was unclear as to where the CNT was best placed to oppose the regime. As this article discusses, encounters with the new opposition inside prison made it clear that the CNT had lost its foothold in the workplace. Contrary to what had been the case in the 1930s, accelerated industrialization and the social uprooting of rural to urban migration did not turn the CNT into a broad, popular, revolutionary front of the ‘dispossessed’. The worlds of Franco's prisons offered a compressed image of the opposition in Spain, revealing the social base of political groups, membership density, and their revolutionary will and commitment. For a fraction of the Juventudes Libertarias, the prison experience during the 1960s was a sombre revelation. While many CNT exiles had thought that the dictatorship was fragile enough to be militarily overthrown by a small band of guerrillas, and that political unions with other veteran Republican organizations, especially the PCE, were not just unnecessary, but ‘counter-revolutionary’ – it was clear that the anarchists were an increasingly small, and needless to say, ageing minority in prison.

By utilizing the sociological perspectives of Karl Mannheim, this article explores the processes by which the prison brought these generational schisms into sharp focus. Prison concentrated generational fault lines in Spain, revealing how the first ‘post-conflict’ generation were coalescing around very different social and political schemas to those of their parents. Indeed, much of the literature which exists on social memory has tended to emphasize sudden generational polarization. ⁵ As Michael Richards has argued, the new urban labour opposition of the 1950s and 1960s was forged, in large part, by rural migrants’ disassociation from, on the one hand, the regime-imposed false memory (or myth) of an idealized peasant life, and, on the other, counter-myths of peasant resistance. ⁶ As the ensuing flight forwards from the countryside collided with the mythology of the metropolis, these new, traumatically assembled, and predominantly young worker constituencies would be forced to construct their own cultures of solidarity in urban neighbourhoods. Collective grievances, over wages and access to housing, were fought without many of the vital tools that had previously been available to their parents – not least of which was an independent (i.e., non-state-controlled) trade-union movement. As a result, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, prisons in Spain began to swell with non-unionized and politically disaffected rural migrants, many of whom had been forced into the world of petty crime, a direct result of the dizzying and fragmenting effects of the regime's ‘economic miracle’.

This violent separation from the pre-civil war past in Spain was not, however, experienced in the same way by the emerging activists of the European New Left. The international legacy of the Spanish Civil War, especially the aborted revolution, conjured up images of universalism and heroism – not defeat, exceptionalism, and tragedy. In the example set by Spanish popular resistance in July 1936, the New Left saw an ideal model of worker self-management, which challenged both the moral bankruptcy of social democracy in the West and Soviet Communism in the East. For those in the New Left who not only gravitated towards the ‘Spanish question’, but also participated in the renewed campaign of armed action against the Franco regime, prison became an arena where these two kindred political generations would literally meet. This article follows the political trajectories emerging from these encounters and looks at how the fading embers of anarchism's ‘golden age’ of the 1930s in Spain were rekindled in prison and then extended outwards across Europe during the uprisings, occupations, and labour strikes of ‘1968’.

State documents on the anarchist prison population during the 1960s remain difficult to access, a long-running effect of the 1977 amnesty for state personnel under the dictatorship. Fortunately, for historians of the anarchist movement and their travails in prison, there exists a rich array of sources (including reports, pamphlets, correspondence, minutes of assemblies, leaflets, and propaganda) produced by the border-crossing anarchist diaspora, huge volumes of which are now held at the International Institute of Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam. One such example is the personal archive of Asturian anarchist and exile, Ramon Álvarez Palomo, who undertook a series of clandestine trips into Spain in the 1960s and established contacts with CNT members still active in their workplaces and in prison. In addition, there are numerous memoirs, testimonies and autobiographies produced by anarchist prisoners from this period. Besides the above-cited sources, I have been able to consult the personal archive of the late Stuart Christie, founder of the Cruz Negra who was held in Carabanchel and Alcalá de Henares in 1964–1967, and thereafter, devoted his life to the libertarian movement in Spain and supporting anarchist prisoners internationally.

The Party is Over? Anarchist Prisoners and the New Left, 1960–1964

In Burgos prison in north-central Spain, one of the main gaols for political prisoners, there were ‘three types of libertarians’, reads an undated letter [c. 1964–1965] addressed to Asturian anarchist Rámon Álvarez Palomo, then living in Paris. ⁷ ‘There are the old activists of the CNT-FAI, the Juventudes Libertarias and finally, the so-called independientes’, the letter continued. It was the last of these which sparked both intrigue and alarm among older CNT cadres. The independientes had been sentenced by Franco's military courts under the swingeing security laws, specifically the law against ‘banditry and terrorism’, for their involvement in a series of bomb attacks. The targets, all property-focused, included the offices of the state single party, Falange, official monuments, and educational institutions aligned with the architects of the regime's new policy of ‘economic liberalization’, the powerful lay Catholic organization, Opus Dei. The route to direct armed action was re-opened by Spain's anarchists at a 1961 CNT congress held in the French city of Limoges. The outcome was twofold. First, buoyed up by the success of Castro's guerrilla army in Cuba, a campaign of direct action would be carried out by an armed clandestine grouping called ‘Defensa Interior’. Second, the Alianza Sindical Española, a trade-union liaison committee in Spain comprising the CNT, the socialist UGT, and the Basque Sindicato de Trabajadores Vascos, received, on paper at least, the full backing of the CNT in exile. The Limoges conference thus marked the reunification of the CNT after 15 years of inaction and internal drifting. ⁸

The majority of libertarian prisoners entering Franco's prison system during the first half of the 1950s, including the independientes, had been mobilized specifically by the CNT youth wing, Juventudes Liberatarias (JJ.LL). While internal police bulletins circulated by Franco's feared political police, the Brigada Politíco-Social (BPS), categorized the independientes as JJ.LL recruits, CNT observers in Burgos prison noted with great concern that this ‘independent’ category of prisoners ‘situate[d] themselves outside both the Libertarian Youth organization and the CNT’. ⁹ The Catalan student and ex-JJ.LL member, Jordi Conill i Valls, ‘has now joined the [Communist] Party’, stated the report. This was a devastating revelation for the anarchists in Spain and in the exiled organization in France. Conill's initial death sentence, subsequently commuted to 30 years, seemed to demand everything of the international anarchist movement abroad. In 1962 in Milan, alongside street demonstrations, Franco's vice consul was kidnapped by Italian anarchists belonging to the Gioventù Libertaria (Libertarian Youth). Such actions were not only impelled by moral outrage, or, as was the case generally in Italy, a pervasive anti-Francoist sentiment which had filtered into the mainstream of public opinion since the end of the Second World War, but also by a belief in, and commitment to, the revival of the libertarian movement in Spain. ¹⁰ But Franco's prisons, the very locus of this renewed internationalism, indicated the limits of this apparent renewal.

The prison in Burgos – the city which was once the headquarters of Franco's first proto-government – was now a recruiting ground for the Communist Party (PCE), a major focal point of the anti-Franco movement. It was clear that what Conill, and other dissident members of the Libertarian Youth, saw in Burgos’ imprisoned communists was not the staid, Stalinist image depicted by Party elders, but a potentially revolutionary social movement. In one sense, there was a simple, non-ideological motive for entering communist ranks: the strength of collective opposition in prison relied heavily on numbers. Political prisoners were conscious, ideologically-driven reformers and revolutionaries, but the basis of successful action in Franco's prisons was shaped by the imminence of ‘civil death’ or survival. ¹¹ Although it is difficult to calculate the precise number of PCE prisoners in Burgos in the 1960s – the Franco regime did not indicate affiliation, classifying all political prisoners as having committed crimes against the ‘interior or external security of the state’ – it is clear from CNT reports that the PCE was in the majority. ¹² Indicating their own comparative weakness, cenetistas lamented the fact that ‘there are all kinds of means available to communist prisoners, materially and financially, making them appear – especially to inexperienced youth activists – as the champions of everything’. ¹³

Beyond Conill's immediate imperative to maximize the efficacy of prison resistance, there were other, deeper and generationally-rooted motives which made him decide to join ‘the Party’. Conill had been born in Barcelona in 1939, a month after Franco's conquest of the city and final wartime victory over the Second Republic. He came of age in Spain, not in exile, and during the 1950s, the transitional period between the harsh autarkic world of the 1940s and the accelerated emergence across the 1960s of consumer capitalism and then of mass tourism. Scholars have often referred to the 1950s, both in Spain, and elsewhere in Western Europe, as the ‘hinge decade’, thus implying a narrative of linear, if not smooth, transition. ¹⁴ But a war against ‘defeated’ Republican-aligned sectors continued to be waged; in the prisons, in the front-line brutal policing tactics of the Guardia Civil and the BPS, and, not least, the entry of the Falange's army of Catholic ‘social workers’ (Auxilio Social) into the home. Fascistic autarky had been used politically by the Franco dictatorship, intensifying hunger and poverty for poorer sectors of the population, and thus becoming the instrument by which the state taught those it deemed ‘hostile’ the lessons of their ‘defeat’ and pushed them to the margins of political life. ¹⁵ This continuation of the war by other institutional means would have a profound impact on Conill's generation, but lacking any memory of the battlefield war, the revolution of 1936–1937, or the Republic, this cohort would not be ideologically bound to what were older, internationally recognized, models of change.

The example of Conill indicates what it is that enables historians to identify generations, and, for the purpose of our inquiry, what it was driving the separation in post-civil war Spain between the old and New Left. As Karl Mannheim put it, generations are produced by ‘dynamic destabilization’, in other words, rapid historical change, when ‘the latent, continuous adaptation and modification of traditional patterns of experience, thought, and expression is no longer possible’. ¹⁶ ‘Dynamic destabilization’ in Francoist Spain meant war, a period of mass imprisonment (1940–1945), widespread intensified poverty, and a brutal process of mass migration. Twenty per cent of the total population changed their place of residence throughout the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. ¹⁷ Brow-beaten by the restoration of an ultra-conservative rural order after Franco's victory in 1939 migrants fled forwards to the urban refuges of the masses in Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao.

For Conill's generation, fresh contact in prison with the remnants of the libertarian movement revealed a social and political chasm between the heroic past of the CNT and its present activity in Spain. Álvarez, a fervent critic of the CNT leadership in Toulouse, received countless letters and smuggled reports from Spain in which anarchist prisoners expressed deep concern over the CNT's lack of strategy. In 1961, a letter co-signed by socialist and anarchist prisoners called upon the exiled group in France to rethink its strategy and overcome its paralyzing nostalgia – to do otherwise would mean ‘past glories will evaporate’. ¹⁸ This correspondence showed how acutely sensitive the prison was to the changes in the social and political composition of the opposition. For anarchist prisoners in Burgos (and elsewhere), it was clear that the PCE's decision to abandon guerrilla struggle, and to organize clandestine meetings of workers of various political and ideological tendencies (socialist, communist, and confessional (Catholic)) was having huge pay offs. By contrast, cenetistas involved in workplace organizing in the port hub of Gijón in the north reported that ‘the situation of the miners, the metalworkers, and the prisoners is deplorable’, with the CNT's Alianza Sindical Española ‘unable to do anything beyond attending to the most urgent cases’. ¹⁹ As historian Angel Herrerín puts it, the CNT of the 1960s was now a faint shadow of its former self, a ‘sindicato sin sindicatos’ [a union without unions]. ²⁰

The fact that this correspondence ended up in the hands of Álvarez, and not CNT official channels, highlighted the profound disconnect between anarchist prisoners and the organization in France. In part, this disconnect was a product of the bipolar world of the Cold War, and the renewed gospel of national security and anti-communism. As a result, cross-border communication was extremely difficult. With increased police presence on both sides of the Pyrenean border serving as the backdrop, Álvarez's correspondence is littered with references to forging ‘identity documents’. ²¹

A striking example of the isolation of anarchist prisoners from the organization in France, and from internal developments within Spain, was Liberto Sarrau. Sarrau was a CNT delegate for interior activities who had been released from Burgos prison in 1959. From Burgos he went to Paris, where he declared the creation of the new Movimiento Popular de Resistencia (MPR). The MPR propagandized a promethean vision of a new Spain, one ‘arising’, to replace the ‘sinking Spain of tyranny and privilege’, with an ‘inevitable revival of resistance’. According to JJ.LL member Tómas Ibánez, Sarrau had constructed a detailed plan to ‘break out’ anarchist prisoners in Burgos. ²² However, when another delegate was sent to Burgos to clarify the situation it was discovered that Sarrau's plan ‘did not correspond to any reality’. ²³

Nevertheless, CNT prisoners had detected a political shift in the outside world, even if the amorphous category of independientes, or the fanciful plans of Sarrau, indicate a failure to fully comprehend it. Moreover, beyond Conill, there were other more mysterious characters lurking in Burgos prison, who seemingly rejected all political officialdoms. This included the 23-year-old French student Guy Batoux, who had arrived in Madrid on 3 April 1962 with the intention of planting a bomb outside the US embassy. Batoux was one of three imprisoned libertarians, all recently arrived from France, and all of whom had crossed the border as couriers for the clandestine guerrilla group ‘Defensa Interior’. ²⁴ Accompanying Batoux, was 17-year old Alain Pecunia, a member of the youth section of the Parisian branch of the French Communist Party, and Bernard Ferri, who Franco's political police recorded as belonging to the youth section of the French Socialist Party. ²⁵ The reasons for the Libertarian Youth now sending international recruits into the volatile fringes of armed struggle in Spain were twofold. The first reason was that in Spain the exiled CNT was alienated from the emergent working class. The internal divisions that ensued from the CNT's alliance with the Republican government during the civil war meant that many anarchists were reluctant to countenance another coalition with the old political parties of the left. Most worker-activists in the 1960s aligned themselves with the Comisiones Obreras (Workers Commissions), a clandestine trade union closely associated with the PCE. Without representation within the Comisiones, nor independent collective bargaining rights on the shop floor, there were few avenues left for Spain's exiled anarchists but direct action. Secondly, and crucially, the Libertarian Youth moved within and across the various political communities within their host countries. ²⁶ Those in France, recognizing that the Gaullist government was not going to tolerate a foreign trade union committed to permanent revolutionary struggle, thus made links with new social movements across Europe. These encounters were signs of a renewed anarchist internationalism. But the reason was also strategic. Many of the actors involved in New Left politics in Europe were not yet known to Franco's political police: Batoux, Pecunia, and Ferri could thus enter Spain as tourists.

The Libertarian Youth were thus positioning themselves centrally within the new conjuncture of the Cold War and the emergence of a non-aligned, anti-colonial Left. At the 1961 Bordeaux meeting of the Asociación Internacional de los Trabajadores (International Workers’ Association AIT), an anarcho-syndicalist federation with roots in the First International, the exiled Spanish section of the CNT committed itself to supporting anti-war and anti-militarist activities. ²⁷ Plans were agreed by the CNT (including the Libertarian Youth) to produce anti-war propaganda that would encourage ‘the youth to desert all capitalist or communist armies’. ²⁸ For these Spanish anarchists, the confrontation between East and West was a confrontation between technologically equivalent, authoritarian, and reciprocally suicidal military systems. Not long after the AIT congress, members of the Libertarian Youth in Britain marched on the nuclear arms base in Aldermaston with the recently established Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). ²⁹ At the same time, Libertarian Youth groups in France crossed over with, and directly participated in, solidarity networks in favour of Algerian independence. In fact, the mysterious Alan Pecunia first came into contact with members of the Libertarian Youth while working with the Algerian Armée de Libération Nationale, helping with the task of identifying members of the pro-colonialist terrorist Organization Armée Secrète (OAS). ³⁰ For cenetistas generally, solidarity with anti-colonial movements in Algeria dovetailed with their own diasporic condition and – albeit to a different extent – their own earlier brutal categorization by the French authorities in the concentration camps of the Second World War (in France and in Algeria). ³¹ Moreover, following the 1953 Madrid Pact between the USA and Franco's Spain, which cemented the Franco dictatorship as a key client of the Western ‘free world’, many Spanish anarchists came to see themselves as victims of US aggression and imperialism. Indeed, the exigencies of Franco's acutely deflationary Stabilization Plan of 1959, set in the political context of the Cold War, encouraged many among the displaced Spanish left to view the ‘homeland’ not as a direct colony, but certainly as being inserted into the US’s informal empire – as a territory that was to follow the typical and ‘correct’ path of development, financed by US credits and loans. ³²

It was at this moment of apparent opportunity that the Libertarian Youth sought to embed the anti-Francoist struggle within the broader New Left, especially in the northern tiers of Europe. There, social democracy had become for many an increasingly suffocating system, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it satisfied the material aspirations of a high proportion of the young, post-war population. The provision of greater social security and full employment in the aftermath of war created new non-material aspirations, which social democracy refused and thwarted, just as traditional, laissez-faire capitalism had stalled earlier demands for political and cultural change. As poverty receded, the unresolved legacies of the Second World War became more evident and important.

The Libertarian Youth knew that what was going on in Franco's prisons complicated the bipolar positioning of a ‘free West’ against an ‘authoritarian East’. They knew that beneath the idyllic image of Spain's beaches, to which European tourists were now beginning to flock, there was a brutal expanse of hidden state violence. In an inventive piece of anti-tourist propaganda, the CNT distributed postcards which showed the underside of Franco's ‘economic miracle’; shanty towns in Madrid, lines of political prisoners standing in military formation, and the armed ‘Guardians of the regime’, the militarized police of the Guardia Civil. ³³ For a politically aware international audience, especially activists like the young Alain Pecunia, such images highlighted the increasingly contested legacy of European colonialism, and brought to mind how Francoism too was a variety of that – its very origins lying in how Spain's (and Franco's) colonial Army of Africa had visited massive, subjugating violence on Spain's own population during the war of 1936–1939. Such images of Franco's prisons in the 1950s and 1960s appeared staggeringly similar to reports of work-brigade conscription in Western colonies. ³⁴ Franco's prisons were thus shaping transnational anarchist perceptions of Spain's dictatorship as the European fascist ‘totalitarianism that got away’, a perception which would be confirmed by the experience of these same activists in prison. ³⁵

Intergenerational Encounters: From ‘1936’ to ‘1968’

Alain Pecunia, Bernard Ferri, and Guy Batoux were split up and sent to three different prisons: Cáceres (Extremadura), Carabanchel (Madrid), and Burgos. A year later, in 1964, they were joined by an 18 year-old Scottish anarchist named Stuart Christie. Stuart had been a member of the Glasgow Committee of 100, the Scottish section of the British-based anti-nuclear direct-action group, which opposed the more ‘accommodating’ methods of a liberal CND. ³⁶ His contact with the Juventudes Libertarias had been facilitated by the anarchist Syndicalist Workers’ Federation, the British contingent of the International Workers’ Association, which had worked closely with the exiled CNT on the anti-tourism campaign. On 11 August 1964, Stuart was detained by the Brigada Político-Social in Madrid and sentenced to a 20-year prison term for carrying explosives intended for use in the political assassination of Franco. After interrogation at Madrid's infamous police headquarters, the Dirección General de Seguridad, he was transferred to the central remand prison in Carabanchel. ³⁷

These international prisoners had arrived in Spain just as the new contradictions of Spanish capitalism – that is to say, the marriage of ideological Francoism with the needs of a rapidly modernizing and expanding industrial economy – had caused an accumulation of social and political pressures. As newly arrived migrants struggled to survive in urban centres that were vastly unequipped to accommodate them, and as result of the mounting pressure consequent on the deregulated nature of Francoist economic development, industrial disputes re-emerged once again in Spain as a space ripe for confrontation. Indeed, it was not long before economistic labour struggles acquired an explosive political dimension; in the spring of 1962, a strike led by workers at the Nicolasa mining plant in Asturias spread across 28 provinces and involved some 300,000 workers. ³⁸ This gave an extraordinary boost to workers’ awareness of their collective power and thus increased their confidence – not just on the streets, and in the factories, but in the prisons too. Miguel García, a CNT ‘elder’ incarcerated in Alicante gaol, summarized the changing social composition of the prison in the following terms:

In the ten years since I had been sentenced, there were great changes outside which, slowly, came to alter conditions in prison. Only one thing remained unchanged: the nature of the State and the regime. It was years since the gaols had been packed like sardines with prisoners of war. Their numbers had begun to thin down, but now, the whole spectrum of society, from the nobility to vagrants, came in as political prisoners. Within prison, we became aware of the new activism, an international and not exclusively Spanish trend, when Jorge Conill … was arrested in Barcelona. ³⁹

The prison authorities responded to this increasingly febrile atmosphere by breaking up concentrated clusters of political prisoners and scattering them across the system. From the 1950s until 1965, male political prisoners were mainly concentrated in Burgos, Carabanchel, and Soria, and women ‘politicals’, always a small minority, in Alcalá de Henares. ⁴⁰ Deep-rooted Francoist anxieties of a dangerous, undifferentiated and uncontrollable proletarian mass ran deep – so prisoners faced more transfers, more moving around, and fewer stable lines of communication with the outside world. However, Carabanchel had always occupied a distinct position within Franco's penal landscape as a major remand prison. ⁴¹ The courts that dealt with political crimes, and which thus tried all prisoners arraigned under Franco's state security legislation of the 1940s (renewed again during the 1960s), were all located in Madrid. This meant that many prisoners awaiting trial throughout Spain would be held in Carabanchel until they were sentenced and sent elsewhere to serve their terms. Moreover, as a result of the fact that in a dictatorship, with little due process and where the executive power ultimately made all judicial decisions, prisoners could be held awaiting sentence for an unpredictable period of time, ranging from weeks to years.

Stuart Christie thus found himself inside one of the major arteries of the Francoist prison system in Carabanchel. And, like Conill, he found fresh contact with the ‘vanguard’ of the anarchist revolutionaries a revelation. The armed action of ‘Defensa Interior’ had given an outward image of an anarchist revival in Spain, but Stuart recalled how ‘most of [his] fellow political prisoners were CP [PCE] members … Among these were most of the central committee, including the [allied] Comisiones Obreras (Workers’ Commissions) under Marcelino Camacho … the rest were Basque separatists from ETA …’. ⁴² By the end of 1964, the sixth gallery (the political wing in Carabanchel) held between 60 and 100 political prisoners, while anarchist prisoners (numbering around 15) were scattered around the four cellular galleries of the prison. Unlike Conill, however, Stuart did not drift towards the Party, for his conception of the CP had been informed by grudge-ridden memories that he had, in effect, assimilated from the CNT elders in exile.

Stuart himself represented a phenomenon which has been overlooked in the scholarship on the New Left. In the efforts to define its apparent novelty, and its sharp separation from its pre-war counterparts, the important role played by intergenerational exchange in fostering the New Left has largely been neglected. Mannheim, one of the foremost theorists of the ‘generation’ concept, understood these connections well. While he argued that rapid historical change forged new generations, he also accepted that a greatly accelerated tempo would see youth ‘attach themselves, where possible, to an earlier generation’. ⁴³ While the New Left conceived of itself as a break with the dead-end of Soviet communism, what we see is that, after an initial period of iconoclasm, it returned to the foundational texts and events of the Marxist (or anarchist) canon (i.e. the 1871 Paris Commune, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the Spanish Revolution of 1936). As such, while the ageing minority of imprisoned anarchists may have appeared as long-lost bohemians belonging to a bygone era, New Left activists deemed their ideals worth rescuing from what they saw as the impoverished political climate of their own present. Viewed through this intergenerational lens, Carabanchel was a reservoir of rich and untold experience.

On the surface, however, Carabanchel was an inhospitable terrain for forging new friendships. Its status as a remand prison, along with its demographic – given Madrid was also one of the main centres of incoming mass rural-urban migration – created a feeling within the prison of transience and atomization. In this socially brittle climate, Stuart sought work which would enable him to meet other cenetistas passing through the prison either for medical treatment or while awaiting onward gaol transfer. After spending a few months working in the privately-owned prison workshops printing the official prisoner newspaper, Redención, he petitioned the governor to become a medical orderly. In this role he came into contact with two anarchist prisoners who would go on to become important nodes for the Cruz Negra: Juan Busquets and Miguel García. Busquets, the child of a CNT activist, was a car factory worker and miner, imprisoned for guerrilla activities in 1948. García, who left school at 11 to work in a Barcelona glass factory, had been released from a Francoist concentration camp in Madrid in 1941, becoming a forger working for the Allies during the Second World War and then a combatant in the anarchist anti-Francoist urban guerrilla group ‘Talión’, which led to his arrest in 1949. ⁴⁴ It was perhaps the rare sight of a cenetista in Carabanchel which meant that such brief encounters ended up making a long-lasting impression on Stuart. But what was most striking about García and Busquets was the sheer number of prisons they had passed through (San Miguel de los Reyes, Burgos, Alicante, Alcázar de San Juan (Ciudad Real), Teruel, and the Model in Barcelona). Both were essentially prisoners-of-war, captured during the last stages of the armed resistance of the 1940s in Spain, and viewed as ‘unredeemable’ by the prison authorities because of their repeated, daring escape attempts. Through their uprootedness, a hallmark not only of their lives in prison, but also of earlier experiences of labour migration and exile triggered by state persecution and rapid industrialization, García and Busquets’ harboured a world of possible connections. As Stuart recalled, ‘this regular movement meant he (Busquets) played a crucial role in the clandestine inter-prison communication network which linked anarchist prisoners across Spain’. ⁴⁵

But attempts to escape or ‘break-out’ of gaol (fugas), seemingly the preferred method of resistance among anarchist prisoners, made this network vulnerable. In 1967, Stuart was suddenly transferred to the maximum-security prison in Alcalá de Henares. The reason for this transfer is evidenced in the long and detailed prison correspondence, which, until now, has been unavailable to historians. On 15 August, Stuart wrote:

As for leaving by other means, don’t think I haven’t thought about it, in fact, this is one of the reasons why I was moved from Madrid. They suspected Edo and myself of plotting something, that is why we have [been] separated. Don’t say anything about this, but they planted a spy in the gallery we were in. ⁴⁶

The reference to ‘Edo’ was to Luís Andrés Edo, one of the authors of what was known as ‘Operation Durruti’, a plan launched by the armed anarchist First of May Group (Grupo Primero de Mayo) in 1966 to kidnap the military commander of the US forces in Spain. The plan failed: Edo and his co-conspirators were detained by Franco's intelligence services and dispersed to prisons across Spain. Despite the failure of the operation, Edo and the First of May Group are indicative of the extent to which the networks of exiled Spanish anarchists and those of the European New Left had cross-fertilized. In a communiqué addressed to ‘international revolutionaries’, the First of May Group encouraged ‘acts of sabotage against diplomatic and military installations of imperialist aggressors’, positioning resistance to Franco as part of the challenge to Western imperialism emanating from the ‘Third World’. ⁴⁷ Moreover, the international response to their imprisonment in 1966 highlighted that this apparent connection with the New Left was quite tangible. In Amsterdam, the home of the Dutch ‘Provos’, a countercultural, theatre-based movement fusing anarchism with Dadaism, the windows of the Spanish embassy were smashed during an anti-Franco demonstration. As a provocation, an antique gun was thrown inside the embassy, ‘symbolising Francoist terror’. Meanwhile, in Brussels, the new ‘capital of Europe’, a ‘Provo Happening’ was staged in the city centre, which saw youth activists re-enact ‘the tortures which awaited the Spanish anarchists’ and distribute leaflets declaring: ‘The provotariat stages war against the Franco regime’. ⁴⁸

The New Left was breathing new life into the increasingly sclerotic and bureaucratic culture of the CNT, which, for decades, had been epitomized by the exiled leadership in Toulouse. But the strength of this new wave of activism, marked by an irreverent nomadism, also constituted its major weakness. In a sense, transnationalism was increasingly becoming a substitute for, rather than a complement to, workplace and community-based organizing – now monopolized by the PCE's narrow but astoundingly effective strategy of entryism into the official vertical trade unions and the shop-floor committees of the clandestine Workers Commissions. Again, the prison correspondence of Stuart Christie is instructive. Detailing his experience in Alcalá de Henares gaol and the difficulty of escaping, he explained: ‘besides one would have to deal with 99% of the prisoners here, they are all informers or latent informers!’. ⁴⁹ His description of the presos comunes (those sentenced under the criminal code) is in stark contrast to his description of Juan Busquets, as ‘a first-class comrade of the old school!’. This sense of fissure between anarchist prisoners and common prisoners was not specific to Christie, although it has to be noted that he was distanced from the comunes by worlds of cultural experience as well as by the relative ‘privilege’ attaching to his international status. But the accounts given by many old-guard political prisoners also reflect the absence of social solidarity between them, as the remnants of the 1930s labour movement decimated by Francoism, and the comunes, who, by the mid-1960s came mostly from the unorganized mass of poverty-stricken, often migrant workers – the poorest sectors of the new working class. Miguel García himself recalled that ‘the [prison] officers had auxiliary warders to assist them in their duties’ and ‘the auxiliaries always chose the ordinary prisoners [as distinct from those imprisoned on political charges] as trusties to assist them’. ⁵⁰

These prisoner divisions give us some further insight into the political stability that was for a time achieved by Francoism. This had many components overall, including the regime's use of ‘old’ forms of clientelism and its co-opting through consumerism of the new white-collar middle classes. But a divided prison population was another component. The effects of earlier massive political repression, combined with the Francoist model of laissez-faire urban and industrial development, had made any understanding, far less collaboration between old-guard political prisoners and the comunes very difficult. Plenty of the latter were the casualized labour that the CNT had once, in the 1930s, counted as its substantial social base. But now the mix of fear and ‘realism’ inculcated by Francoism led the unskilled to shun ‘politics’ and also the old-guard activists whose lives and values most of them were unable to comprehend. But for all that the poor – imprisoned or otherwise – did not necessarily look towards anti-system activists to help improve their lot, it was nevertheless the case that the ground was already moving under Francoism, and in the end the regime would be unable to maintain control.

‘1968’ and the Birth of the International Black Cross (Cruz Negra Internacional)

In Spain, the year which signalled the breaking up of Franco's much-vaunted ‘social peace’, was not 1968, but 1967, when the dictatorship, sensing danger in mounting street demonstrations and in the way demands for political change were increasingly inextricably linked to economic strike demands, cracked down on the hitherto relatively pragmatic trade unionism of the Workers Commissions, declaring them illegal. The PCE which was by this point providing the leadership of the Workers Commissions, was caught out by this, given it apparently closed down the prospect of any gradual opening to democratic reform. ⁵¹ Anarchist activists, on the other hand saw a new opening to revolutionary models of change, as the new state crack-down stimulated anti-Francoist mobilization in the streets, factories, and the prisons. The young Stuart Christie had already seen the early signs of this ferment in his prison sojourn in both Carabanchel and Alcalá de Henares. When he was released in 1967 through international and diplomatic pressure, he returned to London, where he established the Cruz Negra Internacional (The International Black Cross) with British anarchist, Albert Meltzer. Meltzer was a name already familiar to older cenetistas in France. During Spain's civil war of 1936–1939, he had organized illegal arm shipments from Hamburg to Spain for the CNT. ⁵² Coming of age in the era of the Great Depression, Meltzer became a lifelong proponent of ‘class-struggle anarchism’, and was, as such, sceptical of the New Left, especially in Britain, not least because it was predominantly student-led, and therefore, at that point, middle class. But Meltzer also recognized – as did Christie in his activism in the campaign for nuclear disarmament – that a new wave of working-class radicals had emerged within such broader movements. For both Christie and Meltzer, the Cruz Negra Internacional was a means of bringing together two movements previously separated by the rift of continental fascism: the historic workers movement in Spain, and the social movements now arising transnationally in the sequence of protests and conflicts associated with the revolts of ‘1968’.

The Cruz Negra established a stable line of communication in Franco's prisons with both the hardcore continuum of old-guard anarchists (the ‘prisoners of war’) and the new urban guerrillas active in Spain in groups like Defensa Interior and the Grupo Primero de Mayo. The prison network was formed essentially around ties of friendship, with Miguel García, Juan Busquets, and Luís Andrés Edo – that is to say, Stuart's points of contact in Carabanchel – becoming the main conduits. ⁵³ As the only international anarchist organization to have a sustained presence in the prisons outside the official channels of the CNT, the Cruz Negra became a mouthpiece for a small body of anarchist prisoners who were being re-energized by the mounting industrial action outside the prison: it allowed them to maintain a continuous dialogue, linking their own struggle against Francoism with mounting social conflict and class antagonisms beyond, especially in the social democracies of northern Europe.

The immediate activity of the Cruz Negra was divided into two parts. The aim of the first was to provide material support to anarchist prisoners, in the form of ‘food parcels and medical supplies’, while the second focused on aiding the Spanish resistance movement with ‘everything it needs, including print duplicators, typewriters and guns’. ⁵⁴ Setting itself apart from liberal-focused NGOs like Amnesty International, the Cruz Negra defended those who had taken up violent methods of struggle against the Franco dictatorship. As it was put by Christie and Meltzer in a 1969 bulletin,

WHAT IS WRONG WITH BEING GUILTY? – even if sometimes it is not expedient to admit it, if one is accused of fighting tyranny? The Black Cross is trying to undertake ‘red cross work’ for those who fall in the struggle against tyranny, but it does not wish to be a non-combatant unit. ⁵⁵

The assertive line taken by Cruz Negra was not just ideological projection. The reports emerging from Spain via its contacts revealed a picture of increasing combativeness among anarchist prisoners and a dramatic shift in political alliances across the prison landscape. Both factors evidently worried the Francoist authorities. In November 1968, the Cruz Negra received a letter from Luis Andrés Edo, then incarcerated in Soria, which revealed the increased levels of anxiety among prison directors regarding prisoners’ contact with the outside world. The letter gave one example of this: how the father of an ETA prisoner, arriving at Soria during visiting hours, was physically restrained by the local police and detained in the prison for several hours. Relatives of other prisoners who had made the journey to visit their incarcerated kin were also detained. The emotional and traumatic scenes at Soria ‘heated up the minds of the prisoners’, so much so that ingrained sectarian differences were overcome and, Edo wrote, ‘for the first time during my imprisonment here we have managed to co-ordinate an action with “the Party”’. ⁵⁶ Such hybrid alliances were a product of the radicalization occurring across the labour movement in Spain from the late 1960s, as the PCE's ‘entryist’ tactics stalled in the face of state opposition. Its corollary in prison saw some PCE prisoners take radical action, going beyond petitions for amnesty, and the directives of their own party leadership, to support the growing number of hunger strikes.

For international readers of Cruz Negra, the prison scenes in Soria invited comparison with other forms of state intervention being applied elsewhere in Europe against the mounting political mobilization of industrial workers. The distribution of the Cruz Negra relied heavily upon clandestine affinity networks, but its growing continental reach was aided by the International Anarchist Congress held in Carrara, Italy in August 1968, at which Stuart was present as a British delegate. ⁵⁷ Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist and railway worker in Milan, was spurred on by the Cruz Negra, in the midst of the intense labour conflict raging in Italy's northern industrial centres. In 1969, he co-founded an Italian section with Amedeo Bertolo, the anarchist involved in the 1962 kidnapping of Franco's vice-consul in Rome. As Italy's Christian-Democrat-led government buckled under the weight of occupied and barricaded factories, the domestic far-right sought to exploit the ‘anti-system aspects of the revolt’, confronting left activists with street violence and bomb attacks. ⁵⁸ On the afternoon of 12 December 1969, a series of bombs (all of the same design) exploded in Milan at the Piazza Fontana, killing 16 people and wounding 105. In the aftermath, the Italian press immediately mounted an anti-anarchist campaign, and then, without a warrant, the Italian police detained Pinelli. In police custody, Pinelli fell from a window to his death, with the police immediately claiming that he had committed suicide after his alibi had collapsed. The Cruz Negra reported Pinelli's death as symptomatic of an apparent collusion between the ‘rebirth of Italian fascism’ and the Italian state, noting that Police Chief Marcello Guida, once a prison director under Mussolini, was now an Italian representative in Interpol. ⁵⁹

The Cruz Negra bulletins saw what was happening in Franco's prisons as auguring a crackdown on the industrial and student-led militancy occurring across Europe in the aftermath of the May events in France. In its September 1970 news bulletin, ‘police pogroms’ in Italy were followed in column inches by a report from Spain detailing the Guardia Civil unleashing live rounds of ammunition on striking construction workers in Granada –a ‘reminder of the class basis of Franco's regime’. ⁶⁰ ‘THE POLICE ARE INTERNATIONAL’, read another sub-headline in the same issue. In between reports on state repression, the bulletin featured a letter from an anarchist prisoner in Burgos commenting on the political ferment and drawing attention to the ways in which it had given rise to radical and hybrid alliances: ‘Let us pause to honour our comrade Francisco Gil Dejean’, the imprisoned anarchist wrote, ‘his parents (mixed up in the [Franco] regime and doing well out of it) want nothing more to do with him. He has fought for the Ácratas [anarchist-inspired student group] and found himself in gaol in Teruel’. The letter encapsulates the substantial changes in the prison culture of ‘historic’ anarchists across the 1960s. At the beginning of the decade, old-guard anarchist prisoners had been out of touch, precisely because they were reliant on the ossified official political leadership of the CNT in exile. But by the end of the 1960s, they felt connected to the new political mobilizations following the vast social and economic changes triggered by Francoism outside the prison walls. Inside them, too, veteran anarchists were also engaged in a dialogue with the radically transformed workers’ movement.

This exploration of anarchists in prison during the years of the Francoist industrial take-off reveals a complex and nuanced picture which belies the assumption of near extinction given in the extant historiography. Prison could foster political stagnation and a hardening of orthodoxies – detached as the prisoners were from the changing social and political reality of ‘outside’ and still traumatized by Francoism's deliberate and violent separation of the new workers movement from half a century of radical labour culture, politics, and practice. But prison also turned out to be a dynamic and changing environment in which anarchist networks were able to foster a revivifying dialogue with their prisoners which brought them into the world of the 1960s, in the process fostering intergenerational solidarity both inside Spain and internationally. The fact that this happened gives the lie to the idea that the European New Left and its social movements of the 1960s constituted a complete break with the old left. While the prison landscape in Spain could sometimes bring generational schisms into sharp focus – not least between anarchists and recently proletarianized but depoliticized rural migrants – it was also one of the few spaces in Spain in which different political generations were obliged to co-exist, namely old-guard communists and anarchists, with the diverse array of 1960s union activists, students and other activists from New Left parties and groups. The emergence of the Cruz Negra played a small but important part in crossing the historic divides between those workers defeated by fascism in the 1930s and a new generation of workers who could still see fascism's traces beneath the white heat of post-war development and consumerism. At stake in all of this is a historical understanding of how the prison was a living entity, capable of impelling change from within but also linking itself to the accelerating activism of the 1960s beyond the prison walls both in Spain and across Europe.