Individualist, illegalist, propagandist in fact, anarchosyndicalist, platformist, Christian anarchist or even anarcho-primitivist, anarchism has almost as many sensitivities as it has face and if it seems in the minority today, we forget that There was a time when he ruled the world. And yet at the end of the First World War, in Europe, anarchism seemed to have lost almost all its influence. It was not only the attacks of the propagandists by the fact, nor even the loud proclamation of the villainous laws which had made it inaudible, but rather the bombs which, from Verdun to the Somme, passing through the Chemin des dames, by assassinating in certain countries almost a third of the workers, had silenced the mass of activists. Not to mention the millions of amputees, traumatized people and broken faces for whom the revolution was no longer a priority. But on the outskirts of the large industrialized countries, around the edge of the Western world, the anarchists have survived. They gather on the margins of empires, take up arms again and try everywhere to make their ideal triumph. However, faced with a reaction, which also has many faces, libertarians can no longer only imagine sweet utopias. In this fruitful interwar period, where capitalism gives birth to its two filthy beasts, Stalinism and fascism, facing the totalitarian hydra which generalizes theft a little more and industrializes death, they must wage a war on all fronts and more than ever to prove in practice the effectiveness of their thinking. And this is how anarchists were able to lead, without us always remembering it, some of the greatest revolutions of the 20th century and write in red and black letters a new page in our history? For 50 years, on the American continent, anarchists have always innervated the social body. They are organized within the Industrial Workers of the World which have extended their branch from Canada to Australia. They fight within FORA, the great Argentine workers' federation and in Bolivia they give the FOI the black and red flag as its emblem. They lead mass parades in Chile or like here the FORU which makes a show of force in the streets of Montevideo. They hold the docks in the Caribbean, oppose the young banana republics and fight for independence in Cuba or Puerto Rico. In the United States of America, whether they march on roller skates against unemployment or, against the war, also displaying skull and crossbones flags, it is the anarchists, and not the communists who inspire the authorities , despite the name Red Scare a real black fear. In 1917, during a new witch hunt. Huge raids were organized. Thousands of anarchists were preemptively arrested, marched through the prison archipelago and finally deported on the Buford liner, here more subtly renamed Ark of the Soviets. And, as the land of the free fears libertarians more than anything, it is to the tunes of ragtime, with smiles and cartoons that the propaganda is spread. Cartoons which lump together anarchist and Bolshevik vermin, and compare them to rats that need to be exterminated. Cartoons signed by a cheerful captain of industry who will end up having affection for the Nazi Party. You should know that the United States is a country where the war against trade union organizations and workers' movements has been of a harshness that has very few equals in the Western world. The harshness with which the powers that be, often in collaboration with the mafia, you know what I'm saying is real. They collaborated with the mafia to break the unions, to break the workers' movement. There is a very strong repression taking place in the United States, particularly against Italian, anarchist immigration, which at that time was essentially composed of so-called anti-organizational currents. And who was in favor, in favor let's say understood, of expropriations, gray areas etc. And so the authorities will also take advantage of this situation to criminalize, of course, these activists and Sacco and Vanzetti will pay the price. Sacco and Vanzetti were two anarchists who belonged to the militant base. History would never have remembered their names if what happened to them had not happened to them. They were followers of Luigi Galleani, the Italian American de facto propaganda theorist who did not believe in unionism. He thought labor organizations were evil. Because they had a hierarchical, bureaucratic structure and because they ended up becoming a brake on the revolution. He therefore did not believe in the revolutionary role of the union, what he advocated was rather insurrection. And he tried to give birth to it with brilliant actions. Several dozen attacks had been directed against representatives of power such as the billionaire Rockefeller or General Attorney Mitchell Palmer, who here contemplates the damage from his window. The authorities' eyes were naturally turned towards the movement then led by Luigi Galeani, a supporter of propaganda in fact. In his newspaper Cronaca Sovversiva, this trained lawyer advocated the direct, immediate and individual use of violence. His pamphlet Le Salut est en vous had also enjoyed a certain success, which presented itself as a little bomb-making manual for the use of the entire proletarian family. And his movement in recent years had gained importance in the Italian community. Sacco and Vanzetti belonged to this trend. They believed in revolution by any means, as quickly as possible. But when we arrest them, they don't know why they are being arrested. They believe it's because they are anarchists. They therefore remain very evasive, they do not really answer questions and this will be used against them during their trial. On the steps of the Boston courthouse, where curious people and journalists flock, the little shoemaker and the fish seller are actually accused of being the perpetrators of robberies which left two people dead at the end of 1919. Well even if their criminal record is clean, their anarchism serves as evidence against them. And in the crackle of flashes, the news item turns into a political affair. Their affair quickly became an emblematic case. There is extremely broad mobilization in their favor. And this movement, little by little, is spreading throughout the world. The movement to save Sacco and Vanzetti is not only led by anarchists. But also by liberals and unions, who are convinced that the charges against them are very light. And that is indeed the case. On American soil, the anarchists try to obtain the release of the two prisoners by all means. First the bombs as during the attack on Wall Street, the first car bomb attack in history, which left 38 dead and 200 injured. But without much result. By the legal battle, again, which with the play of appeals, counter-investigations, new trials, manages, despite their death sentence, to delay the execution for 7 years. Finally, through media agitation with defense committees emerging almost everywhere. But if these campaigns in favor of Sacco and Vanzetti are initiated by anarchists, as disconcerting as it may seem, it is those who on the other side of the globe have become their worst enemies who are at this moment taking their defense. It is still a real irony that it was the communists who adopted their cause, because at the same time the communists were executing and imprisoning anarchists in the Soviet Union. They therefore could not have sympathy for the ideas of Sacco and Vanzetti. We know today that it was indeed in Moscow that the decision was taken to exploit the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti, to effectively make him the symbol of bourgeois repression, of capitalist repression in the state. which symbolizes big capital, that is to say, effectively, the United States of America. It was also intended to allow the Stalinists to accumulate a sort of moral capital. They attracted the sympathy of the workers by defending these men who risked death. But it was indeed an exploitation of the Sacco and Vanzetti affair to better serve their own interests. And that's really sad. Unaware of attempts at manipulation and sensitive to the injustices done to anarchists, the base of communist activists spares no effort. From Place de la République in France, to Tokyo via Berlin, Sofia, Assumption and Trafalgar Square in the United Kingdom, they also opposed the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Nothing will help. Despite this immense mobilization, they were executed by the electric chair in 1927 after their appeal was rejected. And this has a devastating impact on the anarchist movement. The anarchist movement was broken in the United States and we would not see it again, at least until the 1960s. It would indeed take a long time for the governor of Massachusetts, denouncing the manipulations and recognizing the instrumentalizations, to officially rehabilitate the two men by declaring that “all dishonors should be removed from their names forever.” And 50 years after their death sentence, thanks to Joan Baez who sang, to a tune composed by Ennio Morricone, Vanzetti's last words, the anarchists' funeral march could become a global anthem for justice and freedom. Here's to you Nicolas and Bart This song is for you Nicolas and Bart Rest forever here in our hearts. You will forever remain in our hearts. The last and final moment is yours. Your last hour is yours. That agony is your triumph. And this agony is your triumph. Anarchism then underwent an enormous diaspora. Diaspora of Russian anarchists, diaspora of North American anarchists. Diaspora of Italian anarchists. Many came naturally to France, because France was not a dictatorship, it was still a liberal democracy. And so they emigrated to France. The anarchist movement which had hoped to be able to bring about the triumph of the revolution in the aftermath of the world war, in fact found itself defeated across the board. And the question arises: why were we beaten? Paris has once again become the center of the world. These are the Roaring Twenties. Montparnasse took over from Montmartre. In the colorful light of the first neon lights, at the Rotonde, at the Dôme, or at the Select, in the tradition of Courbet, Pissaro or Seurat, the artists are inspired by libertarian thought. Let us think of Duchamp who called himself an " anartist", of certain members of the Dada movement who published their first works in libertarian journals, of the first surrealists who could affirm with Breton that "An anarchist world... a surrealist world : It's the same thing"; whether we think of the Russian emigrant painters of the refugees in the hive, of the Anglo-Saxon writers or even of those unclassifiable people like Léo Malet, the young Jean Dubuffet, Jean Vigo and Jean Cocteau; , anarchism blows its wind of freedom and revolt on the arts But far from the benches of moleskine, the day after the armistice, the workers' movement, with its million and a half dead and its four million mutilated, has paid. very dear the follies of a few men And in the patriotic intoxication which follows the victory, they gradually turn away from anarchism There is really a rupture, a rupture of culture which is linked to four years of society. totally militarized. It does not promote the development of anarchism and it is not, in my opinion, a coincidence that the form of workers' party that will emerge after the First World War is Bolshevism. that is, a hierarchical structure, which resembles the structure of the factory and the structure of the army. In the 1920s, despite the major strikes led by revolutionary trade unionists, French society and the workers' movement were in fact slowly but irremediably giving in to new sirens. By founding the Communist Party following the Congress of Tours, the French Marxist-Leninists, strengthened by the Bolshevik takeover in Russia and the creation of the Comintern seduce the proletarians. They gain ground on the anarchists, seize their structures, reappropriate their martyrs and despoil their symbols. Like the International which, minus a few embarrassing verses, becomes the anthem of the Soviet Union. This struggle initiated by Leninists almost everywhere has its victims here too: two anarchists are, for example, assassinated in violent street battles for the takeover of the union hall. But as if that were not enough, at the end of the war, the anarchists saw a new threat rising before them: because in order to further mislead the workers, fascinate the sub-proletariat and reassure the petty bourgeoisie, capitalism had in fact decided to wear its mask, the most spectacular: fascism. They had participated in the war and they had learned the most harmful lesson of the war: that of violence. But unlike left-wing revolutionary violence, fascist violence is more professional. Because the fascists understood in war that violence must be organized. This growing organization of fascists in and through violence is accompanied by an attempt to recover symbols of anarchism. As does the French action chaired by Charles Maurras. She created the Cercle Proudhon, named after the founding father of anarchism, in order to attract workers into its fold. It will become the cradle of French fascism. Or as Benito Mussolini, a former schoolteacher and journalist, did, who founded the National Fascist Party, and dressed his young militias in shirts in the black color of anarchy. This son of a revolutionary socialist also frequented certain figures of the movement such as Leda Raffanelli, the Italian activist converted to Islam, with whom he had a brief love affair in his youth. And this is undoubtedly the origin of the persistent legend according to which the Duce was, before the war, an anarchist. I have an exceptional anecdote that will give you an idea of Malatesta's flair. In 1913, Malatesta returned to Italy, he went to Milan, and there he met Mussolini for an hour. At the end they greet each other and a friend of Malatesta asks: “So what do you think of Mussolini?” ". Malatesta replies: “He is not a socialist, he is even less an anarchist, he is a revolutionary who will travel many paths. Yes, it's true that Mussolini translated Kropotkin's book on the Great French Revolution, but he was never an anarchist, absolutely never. And following Malatesta, the anarchists were not mistaken and immediately violently opposed the advent of the new despots. They are even the only ones to fight the threat with weapons in hand. As in Italy, where Michele Schiru, Angelo Sbardellotto or Anteo Zamboni, who would end up lynched by the crowd, each in turn instigated assassination attempts on Mussolini. In Spain, it is the fascist dictator Primo de Rivera who is targeted while in France, the heroic Germaine Berton kills the editor-in-chief of Action Française. While a veritable apartheid regime rages in the United States of America, only the libertarians of the IWW are able to confront the racist militias of the Ku Khu Klan in the street. And we forget that in Germany, if the anarchist Marinus Van der Lubbe burned down the Reichstag, it was because it had become the antechamber of Hitlerism. But for the majority of the movement, the individual response is no longer appropriate and it is during the debates of the first Antifascist Fronts that they expose what is, according to them, the only possible response to the threat. Very schematically, for the anti-fascist fronts there is this story of the lesser evil. If the main evil is fascism, we must all unite against fascism and when fascism has been defeated we will fight among ourselves, in a dialectical manner, on the different ways of organizing society. Anarchists do not accept this, he thinks that if we have to fight fascism militarily, we must also fight it with a social revolution. For them, the only way to eradicate fascism is through revolution which will undermine the economic and social bases of fascism. In June 1926, in Paris, a text appeared entitled Platform for the organization of the General Union of Anarchists. It is a thunderclap in the small libertarian world not only for the call it launches for the unity of a movement which has always been rebellious to any form of organization. But also for the name of its main signatory: a returnee from the valleys of ashes and tears of Ukraine, who now works chained to the assembly lines at Renault, whose body is only a long scar: Nestor Makhno. Makhno arrives in Paris after having tasted internment in Romania, Polish prisons, etc. It therefore arrives in a period where both revolutionary ideals are still in decline because the period is no longer like that anywhere in Europe and where on the other hand uh... the image of the USSR is quite positive for that the communist movement was formed on this and therefore the anarchist movement finds itself extremely marginalized. In relation to this you have anarchists who believe that the origin of this defeat was the absence of organization, of consultations more precisely between the anarchists between the two. And this is the point of view which is defended by what we call the Makhnovists, that is to say the supporters of Makhno who will develop documents with Archinov in which they declare themselves in favor of the constitution of a structured anarchist organization. Founded on the principle of... collective responsibility that for them it is something essential to be able to resume the fight and win. Anarchism is not a beautiful fantasy nor an abstract philosophical idea: it is a social movement of the working classes. It must rally its forces into a general and permanent organization as current events and the strategy of the social struggle require. The Platform, published below, represents the broad outlines, the skeleton of such a program. It must serve as a first step towards the rallying of libertarian forces into a single active revolutionary community, capable of action (...). It is time for anarchism to emerge from the swamp of disorganization, (…) Long live the organized anarchist movement! Long live the General Anarchist Union! Long live the Social Revolution of the workers of the world! Some could read the platform as a desire to imitate the Bolshevik party, but it is in reality a transposition of what the Makhnovtchina was as an anarchist group. That is to say, it is an elimination of anarchism of artistic tendency, of individualist tendency or of terrorist anarchism. It really is class struggle led by armed groups. Instead of encouraging the gathering of the anarchist movement, Makhno's call above all provokes one of those interminable debates of which libertarians have the secret. Responses are coming from all over the world. We oppose, we argue, we synthesize. Confusion sets in. All this only strengthens Makhno and his team in their conviction that it is necessary to unite and discipline the anarchists a little more. He decided to gather his supporters in L'Haÿ-les-Roses in the Paris suburbs during an international conference which was held on March 20, 1927, at the Les Roses cinema. Participants included Russian anarchists; Italians, Poles, Bulgarians; and even Chinese people, including the novelist Badjin. But it was particularly the situation in Spain that interested Makhno at that time. Why Spain? We asked ourselves the question a lot, perhaps because we don't like anarchists, that's Léo Ferré who said that, but much more concretely it's because Spain is a country where socialism is born anarchism, that is to say it is not a tendency of socialism but in Spain socialism is anarchist. Anarchism in Spain does not only have a popular origin like in France or Italy but a real popular base, a popular base of thousands, hundreds of thousands of activists. A popular base from which comes an anarchist mechanic in his thirties who, in those days, took refuge in Paris and caught Makhno's attention . His name is Buenaventura Durruti. They share their experiences, talk about past failures, talk about new possibilities. Durruti reveals to him his terrorist past, tells him about the already long-standing organization of the anarchist movement in Spain and tells him of revolutionary hopes in Catalonia or in the plains of Aragon which so resemble the steppes of Ukraine. Impressed by the Spaniard's courage, intelligence and determination, Makhno delivered his political testament to him and promised that if the revolution broke out in Spain, he would come and fight alongside him. What anarchists defend, want, what they aspire to is a very high ideal but one that requires long preparation. In Spain, we experienced this there were 70, more than 80 years of preparation for the Spanish Civil War. So when the revolution breaks out in Spain, people are ready. They've been preparing for this for a very long time. In 1936, in Spain, in fact, if the anarchists are ready, it is not only because since the end of the 19th century they have carried out some of the exploits of propaganda by the fact such as the attacks of the mysterious Mano negra or the assassination in 1912 of the President of the Council by Manuel Pardiñas Serrano reconstructed here for the purposes of a semi-documentary film, it is also not because some of the great martyrs of the cause like the garrotees of Jerez de la Frontera, Francisco Ferrer or the murdered peasants of Casas Viejas, are Spanish, not even because the newspaper of the Catalan anarchists resonates the same words as the slogan of the Mexican Revolution, nor because some of the great peasant or worker insurrections took place. took place in the Levant, in Andalusia, in Rioja, in Catalonia, or recently in Asturias with its October Revolution put down by a certain General Franco on the orders of the very young bourgeois democracy. No, if the Spanish anarchists are ready, it is because the libertarian movement in the peninsula has been solidly organized from the beginning. First within a powerful Spanish section of the Workers' International, then the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation) and the CNT (National Confederation of Labor) which was on the eve of Franco's coup d'état. one of the largest and best structured unions in the world. The world is vast, but it is unique in Western Europe, that the main union force, but it is not limited to that, the main social force, not political because the term is ambiguous, organized is the CNT . We counted that at the end of spring 36, around a million and a half people were members of the National Confederation of Labor across the whole of Spain, including almost half in Catalonia. . With only one permanent employee, it's incredible when you think about it, just one employee for such a large organization. In 1936, Makhno died and Durruti returned to Spain. Elections take place. For once, anarchist organizations, which do not present any candidate, call on their activists to vote for the Popular Front. Thanks to millions of votes from libertarians, a left-wing assembly made up of socialists, democratic republicans and only a few communists who then represented a tiny minority of the Spanish workers' movement was narrowly elected. The reaction from the right is not long in coming. General Franco summons all the barracks to take control of the country. It's civil war. Francisco Franco's coup d'état occurred in 1936 and Spain burst like a watermelon. On one side there is a progressive front and on the other a fascist front. And for three years, it will be a radical opposition. As in Italy or Germany, faced with the putsch, the big bourgeoisie applauds, the “oligarchs” provide their financial support to the fascists, and the “democrats” abdicate. The Popular Front government gives up. Instead of calling for resistance, he resigned 3 times in the same day. The people are left to their own devices. And half of the country falls under Franco's control. Libertarian organizations then launched a general call for mobilization. Everywhere, spontaneously, as one man, anarchists are rising. In Catalonia, led by Durruti who heads the defense of Barcelona, the libertarians defeat the putschists "To the barricades", the anthem of the CNT that Valeriano Orobón, one of the theorists of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism, wrote in a few hours, becomes the cry of an entire people. Black storms shake the air. Dark clouds prevent us from seeing. Even though death and pain await us, Duty calls us against the enemy. Columns are formed Durruti is appointed general delegate of a militia of volunteer fighters. With 3000 men, divided into several centuries which bear the names of their martyrs such as the Sacco and Vanzetti Centuries, the Durruti Column, like the Red and Black Column, marched on Zaragoza and converged on Aragon to fight the fascist armies. And inspired by the Makhnovtchchina, Durruti and his men wage both war and revolution. Get up, working people, into battle! We must overcome the reaction. To the barricades! To the barricades! For the triumph of the Confederation To the barricades! To the barricades! For the triumph of the Confederation They are pushing back fascism which the later Republican armies will not be able to do. But they will push back fascism , particularly in Aragon. And as soon as the columns liberate a village, libertarian communism is immediately proclaimed there. In each village through which the Durutti column passed, we talked with the peasants. The anarchists told them that that's it, they could remove the separations between the fields, create large collective zones and work the land all together. In their march, the libertarians chase away the masters and the gods and announce the end of privileges. In the squares of liberated villages, new dances replace the old laments. Couples form in front of everyone. We share land, work and bread. We give retirement to the elders, we take the time to live. We invent practices and recreate solidarity. Anarchism here pushes its logic to its ultimate limits. Peasant assembly, literacy campaign, more than 800 towns and villages in Spain come together. And one of the greatest collectivization experiments in history begins. In practice it is... an explosion of experiences. Well, many communities, and not a village of 200 inhabitants, which eliminate money. Ah good ? But how are we going to live? So we invent, because that wasn't in the theoreticians' texts. For example, we invent the family salary. Everyone works, we have production, how do we distribute it? In terms of everyone's efforts? No, in terms of everyone's needs. They had abolished money, it seems incredible today, but there were thousands of them, they organized themselves, of course that in these liberated territories the clergy was expropriated and the former exploiters now had to work hand in hand with the peasants. It's not going to go well everywhere. Because firstly, we drive out the civil guard, we drive out or eliminate the fascists from the village. Sometimes Franco's troops will return, and we can imagine the repression that will be imposed. We talk about churches being burned, we also talk about priests killed by anarchists. It's true, it happened. Power when it is taken back by the people generates this kind of action. Bakunin himself said it, he said when the revolution comes, it is inevitable that a hundred heads will fall. 100 heads is not a lot when you think of the abuses committed by the fascists. Thanks to the material sent in almost unlimited quantities by Henry Ford and the support of the Italian troops or the dismal Condor Legion, the Francoists are in fact engaged in a real social purge and an ideological cleansing. Like in Seville where 8,000 people were put to the bayonet or like in Guernica, where men, women and children were indiscriminately crushed under bombs. Despite the white terror that is falling, the libertarians' requests for arms from bourgeois democracies, even when published on stamps, remain a dead letter. Anarchists can, however, count on the international solidarity of the movement which, from newspapers to conferences, calls everywhere to join the ranks of the insurgents. The French Sébastien Faure or the anarchist burglar Marius Jacob, the Algerian Mohamed Saïl, the Argentinian Diego Abad de Santillán, the Belgian Louis Mercier Vega, the Russian Georges Sossenko, Simone Weil who is involved in the Durruti Column like Emma Goldman who is over 67 years old comes to Catalonia, from all over the world, men and women arrive in Spain to support the revolution. And with the first internationalist columns, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade composed in particular of IWW, the Malatesta Battalion which we nicknamed Death Battalion or the Louise Michel Battalion from France, the foreign revolutionaries suddenly took the measure of the change. In the countries from which they come, whether they are French, English, Americans, whether they are German or Italian refugees, the others are in the Franco camp, eh, in their country, there is no never had, they have never, at any time in their history encountered an anarchist movement of this importance. We have a wonderful testimony with George Orwell who is in England who frequents not communist circles but rather Trotskyist circles and who will come to Spain to fight. He arrives in Barcelona and it's a real discovery. In England he was unaware that anarchists existed and held the city. So the work in question has a strange title since it's Homage to Catalonia but you have to read it, it's fantastic. In theory it was absolute equality and in practice it was very close. We had a taste of socialism. Many of the normal motives of the civilized city had absolutely ceased to exist. The usual class division of society had almost disappeared. There were only the peasants and us there. And no one recognized anyone as their master. While the internationalist battalions leave to support the anarchist columns on the front, at the rear having in turn become aware of the central role played by propaganda, the libertarians seize the cinema industry and, with their meager means, show the fierce battles that they then fought in Aragon. But in this war of images, where for the first time it is they who are filming, the anarchists do not forget to bear witness to the scale and specificity of their revolution. CNT operators seize an insurgent capital on the spot. The first report on the events in Barcelona was produced by the CNT union, the public entertainment union. They go out into the street to see what is happening on the barricades. We have fantastic images of a city in revolution. We don't have any for St. Petersburg or other places, we have them. What is a city in revolution? In these Images, we see a city that is practically anarchist. With exceptional popular enthusiasm that has never been repeated in all of history. These images reveal to the world the importance and coherence of the Spanish Libertarian Revolution. Amidst the remains of barricades and destroyed centers of power, anarchist documentarians like Felix Marquet reveal each stage of the great upheaval. Here, anarcho-syndicalism functions in full force and gives its measure: all forms of bureaucracy, non-productive professions, employment of foremen are abolished. The major decisions are taken in Council, the various tasks carried out jointly, the means of production recovered by the community. In Catalonia, which is by far the leading industrial region in Spain, more than 75% of companies that are self-managed. Trams, taxis and buses, hotels and restaurants, bakeries, fishing and catering trades, textile workshops, the leather and shoe industry, all small businesses as well as the largest companies are now managed collectively without drop in production or reduction in yield. The revolution even attacks culture which suddenly becomes popular and social again. Cinema, symphony orchestras, opera or cabaret are managed directly by actors, dancers and musicians, technicians and usherettes who are all members of the CNT. Emma Goldman, who is 67 years old and came to Spain to support the Catalan revolution, can declare: The collectivization of factories and land represents the greatest achievement of all revolutionary periods. Your revolution will forever destroy the idea that the anarchist project means chaos. Even if Franco wins and the Spanish anarchists are wiped out, your work will live on forever. That means anarchism works. It works but under what conditions? On the condition that a majority of the population is convinced by libertarian principles. It is therefore possible to create a society without authority and without government or with the minimum of authority and the minimum of government. This triumph of anarchism in Spain found a final but paradoxical expression on November 4, 1936 when the Republicans decided to form a new Victory government in Madrid. In order to bring together the different anti-fascist forces against the Francoists for the first time in history, 4 libertarians become ministers. Their presence on the one hand aims to strengthen the government. But it is also a way for anarchist militias to obtain weapons. So it’s a bit of give and take. But these are ministries that don't really matter. If they enter government it is for a strategic purpose. They do it in a way to control the government to prevent the government from having anti-anarchist schemes. In practice, there were no more weapons for the anarchist militias and in the eyes of the combatants, this entry into the government was at worst a betrayal and at best a mistake. And then, there is a split between the anarchist base and these four ministers. The anarchist movement begins to split. The Communist Party, also represented in the government, and which enjoys an increasingly preponderant place, thanks to the military support that Stalin provides to the Republic, intends to take advantage of this disunity. He demands that the libertarian revolution be postponed and that the anarchist militias, disarmed, be reintegrated into a regular army led by political commissars sent specially from the USSR. The government and the 4 ministers vote on this proposal. Durruti considers this a betrayal. He speaks: “If you do not want those who are fighting to confuse you, in the rear, with our enemies, fulfill your duty. The war we are currently waging is designed to crush the enemy at the front, but is he the only enemy? No. The enemy is also the one who opposes revolutionary conquests, who is among us, and whom we will also crush.” In the eyes of the Stalinists and the Republicans Durruti and his column who hold Aragon have become too strong, too dangerous and too radical. There is an urgent need to regain control. From the moment we want to radically change things, the reformists are against you, the Stalinists who want to reconstitute a hierarchical society are against you, obviously, uh..., the bourgeoisie is also against you. And it is at this moment that the Republicans are caught in a dilemma and many of them say: we prefer the fascist order to anarchism. To weaken the anarchists and have Durruti on hand, the government then decides to bring its column to Madrid which is besieged by the Francoists. Libertarians sense the trap. But Durruti hopes to seize this opportunity to revive the revolutionary process in the Spanish capital. His death, which occurred in troubled circumstances, gave rise to the wildest rumors. He was in a car and he wanted to understand the situation. So he got out of the car. When he gets back into the car, he dies. More precisely, he receives a bullet. One of the first interpretations is that it is an assassination. A shot like that, at point-blank range, can only be assassination. And it is a thesis immediately propagated by the Francoists who say that the Republicans are killing each other . And then this thesis is taken up by the Communist Party. Who says that anarchists are petty bourgeois, disorganized and that they kill each other? But for me it was an accident, there was a soldier in the car who had a rifle, those rifles that were there at that time, with the safety that didn't really work. And when Durutti stands up, he receives the shot. During the war, with a personality like Durutti saying that he died stupidly, because of a weapon that didn't work well, it was a bit ridiculous. Even today the circumstances of Durruti's death are not clarified. His body was transported across the country to Barcelona. More than 500,000 people marched to the Montjuïc cemetery where he was buried. It was the last large-scale public display of anarchist strength during the Spanish Civil War. Durutti was a symbol, and without Durutti, anarchism remained without a figurehead. Anarchism is a political theory that provides for the destruction of power. It is not a strategy of political conquest, communism on the other hand is. And the communists, who were only 10,000 against millions and millions of anarchists, succeeded in less than a year, supported by the Soviet Union, in taking the situation back in hand. And it is then that the great repression can begin, which will culminate with the events of May 37 where there is a confrontation and there, the libertarian revolution will be crushed. It was during what the history of anarchism has remembered under the name of the May Days of 1937, of which Ken Loach's film Land and Freedom only shows a part, that this crushing took place. It all begins with the “Battle of Telefonica”. Since the start of the Revolution, anarchists have controlled the Barcelona telephone exchange. The Republicans allied with the Stalinists want to dislodge them at all costs. It's the spark. The people of Barcelona are building barricades. Despite calls for calm from anarchist ministers, he opposed himself as at Kronsdat 15 years earlier but this time alongside the Trotskyists of the POUM, almost unarmed with more than 3,000 equipped and trained assault guards. There is a week of confrontation. We must remember that Franco's Putsch was defeated in Barcelona in two days. But the fighting there, between the base and the government lasted seven days with more than 1000 dead and hundreds injured. After the defeat of the anarchists during the days of May 37 and the repression that followed, the doors of Barcelona were opened to the fascists. Counter-revolutionary measures from the Republican and Stalinist government could multiply in the small territory it still controlled: on May 25, the Anarchist Federation was excluded from the popular courts; on June 6, a government decree made all rural communities illegal. At the beginning of August, the Aragon Regional Defense Council was definitively dissolved; At the end of August, criticism of the USSR was prohibited. On January 6, 1938, the government prohibited by decree the issuance of notes or currency by committees. And during the year 38, the government cancels all the remains of collectivization and reinstates the big owners in their rights. The Spanish libertarian revolution was defeated and Moscow Pravda could state in its editorial: "the purge of the anarchists was carried out with the same energy as in the Soviet Union". The Spanish Civil War ended on April 1, 1939. Many anarchists are interned in concentration camps. And many anarchists are also shot. It's incredible when we compare the number of members of the CNT or the anarchist federation just before the Spanish social revolution and what remained just after the victory of fascism. One might believe that it is fascist repression which is the cause of this disappearance but in reality it is mainly due to the repression of the Republican government in agreement with the Stalinists. And all historians confirm this. This war in Spain is a profoundly dramatic episode in the history of the 20th century. Even if it is not an episode that we spontaneously think of when we study the history of the 20th century. For me this is one of the turning points. It's something bloody, it's something horrible in the history of the 20th century what happened there. The abandonment by the democracies, the Italian fascists, the Nazis, the USSR of the Stalinists: the whole world is uniting to make this experiment fail. As you know, it fails. Crossing the Pyrenees pass in the middle of crowds of refugees taking the road to exile, those who survived still wonder what they lost for and where and when they will be able to resume the fight. If the situation of anarchists after the First World War was extremely difficult, the situation of anarchists after the failure of the Spanish Revolution was downright catastrophic. The only thing left for them to do is what? To join the Bolsheviks? To convert to fascism? If they want to continue the fight, what can they do? Join the French army to fight the Nazis? What to do apart from saving your skin? In April 1939, World War II had not yet started. But from the concentration camps in which France hosts the survivors of the Spanish Revolution, how could Iberian anarchists not be distraught? Especially when we remember that Edouard Daladier, the President of the French Council who had already reimposed the 48-hour week and signed the Munich agreements, decided to appoint first ambassador to Franco Philippe Pétain "the noblest and most human nature of our military leaders", according to the expression of Léon Blum. But if the situation is so difficult for them, as for all anarchists in the world, it is because the counter-revolution is on the verge of triumphing everywhere. In fascist countries of course, but also in socialist republics or in liberal democracies, the reaction recounts its string of deaths as during the Memorial Day massacre, in the United States of America where the Chicago police murdered dozens of workers including a wife and three children. And as always, in a world covered in barbed wire, libertarians are among the first targets of repression. From Vernet to Oriannenburg, they were very quickly rounded up, deported and, like Eric Mühsam, executed. Because in a context of generalized crisis of capitalism, the crushing of the revolutionaries constituted, for the bourgeoisie, the necessary preliminary to its desire for expansion. And imperialism, which we recognize yesterday as today because it only has the word “Peace” on its lips, has been preparing for war for a long time. Spain, like Abyssinia or Manchuria, was much more than dress rehearsals. All the non-aggression pacts in reality only tended to accelerate the process already underway, and the exacerbation of national feelings had the sole objective of preventing workers from uniting. It was therefore necessary at all costs to erase the very memory of these men and women who had abolished the state, money and borders, and tried against all odds to build a better world. And so in the darkness of a new world war, which will unleash the most barbaric passions and transform the earth into a vast field of ruins, while the workers will be regimented, fanaticized, reduced to slavery or to ashes, the echo of Durruti's last words could be lost: We have always lived in poverty, and we may continue to do so for a time, but do not forget that we, the workers, are the sole producers of wealth. We are the ones who operate the machines, we who extract the coal from the mines, we who build the cities, we know that we will only deserve ruins because the bourgeoisie will try to destroy the world in the last moments of its history. But we are not afraid of ruins, because we carry a new world in our hearts.