Francisco Ferrer Guardia

Francisco Ferrer Guardia (baptized in Catalan as Francesc; Alella, January 14, 1859 - Barcelona, October 13, 1909) was a Spanish freethinker and anarchist educator. He was sentenced to death by a court martial that accused him of having been one of the instigators of the events of the Tragic Week in Barcelona in July 1909. His death sentence and his subsequent execution raised a wave of protests throughout Europe and throughout America, and also in Spain, which ended up causing the fall of the Maura government.

Ferrer Guardia collected the modern tradition initiated by Rousseau in the XVIII century —contrary to authority and religious worldview—, to adapt it to anarchism and free thought that flourished in industrial cities.

Biography

Early Years

Despite the disparity of sources that point to his birth on January 10, according to the parish register Francisco Ferrer Guardia was born on January 14, 1859 in Alella, in the El Maresme region (province of Barcelona) His parents, Jaume Ferrer and Maria Àngels Guàrdia, were wealthy peasants, owners of the Boter farmhouse (Coma Clara). Two days later, on January 16, he was baptized with the names of Francesc, Joan i Ramon in the church of Sant Feliu de Alella. Coming from a very Catholic and monarchical family, Ferrer and his brother Josep reacted as anticlerical and Ferrer entered the Masonic lodge Verdad of Barcelona. At fourteen years of age, he was sent by the family to work in Barcelona, where he entered as an apprentice in a flour store in the San Martín de Provensals neighborhood, whose owner enrolled him in night classes and initiated him into the ideals republicans. Self-taught, he thoroughly studied the doctrine of Francisco Pi y Margall and the internationalist theses.

Approach to anarchism

In 1883 he started working as a inspector on the Barcelona-Cerbère railway line, which he took advantage of to act as a liaison with Ruiz Zorrilla, whose Progressive Republican Party he was a member of. In 1886 he supported the military pronouncement of General Villacampa, a supporter of Ruiz Zorrilla, whose purpose was to proclaim the Republic, but when he failed, he had to go into exile in Paris, accompanied by Teresa Sanmartí, with whom he would have four children. He subsisted by teaching Spanish and working as Ruiz Zorrilla's unpaid secretary. Until the 1890s he continued to be a Republican, when he began to take an interest in anarchism. He participated in 1892 in the Universal Congress of Freethought organized in Madrid (also known as Congreso Librepensador Madrid de 1892 ) by the International Federation of Freethought (based in Brussels).

In 1893 he separated from Teresina, who out of spite and in disagreement over the custody of their two eldest daughters, shot him with a revolver on June 12, 1894, without fatal consequences. Ferrer did not file a complaint.From 1895 to 1898 he continued to teach at the Liceo L & # 39; Espagnol pratique .

Modern School and libertarian pedagogies

In 1899, he married Leopoldine Bonnard, a freethinking teacher, with whom he toured Europe. He took advantage of this time to conceive the anarchist educational concepts that he would later apply in Spain in his projects, and he met a group of anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists (Jean Grave, Jean Jaurés, Federico Urales or Anselmo Lorenzo), who decisively influenced his thinking. A large inheritance (one million francs) from a former student, Ernestina Meunier, made it possible for her to carry out her project in Barcelona, where she inaugurated the Modern School in August 1901, in line with the libertarian pedagogy that brought her the enmity with the conservative sectors and with the Catholic Church, who saw in these secular schools a threat to their interests, as exclusive owners of education in Spain. In that circle he would meet Soledad Villafranca Los Arcos who, from the end of 1905 until her death, would already be her partner, to whom he would bequeath the New School of & # 34; Mas Germinal & # 34;.

The Modern School promoted by Ferrer operated intermittently in Barcelona from 1901 to 1909, a period in which it was repeatedly closed and suffered persecution from the most conservative political and religious sectors of the city. It had more than a hundred children of both sexes enrolled in school, thus practicing coeducation, something new and unusual in those times, complemented by the publication of a bulletin, talks and a popular university for adults, recitals and theater. Following a pedagogical approach similar to its contemporary, the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, in its classrooms religious teachings were not taught, but scientific and humanistic ones were taught, non-competitiveness, free and individual thinking (that is, not conditioned), hiking to the field and the integral development of the child. Throughout the first third of the XX century, many schools, libertarian ateneos and popular universities would follow the 'Ferrerian' approaches of the School modern.

Photograph by Campúa in New World (6 June 1907): Ferrer Guardia, prosecuted in the case of the attack against Alfonso XIII of 1906 on Calle Mayor, at the time of being taken to the audience.

At the end of 1905, he would have offered to help José Nakens financially by buying books, but the republican publicist would have rejected the offer due to ideological differences. A supporter of the strike as a revolutionary weapon, he edited the newspaper La General Strike, until in 1906 Mateo Morral, translator and librarian of his educational center, perpetrated the frustrated attack against Alfonso XIII. This resulted in the closure for Ferrer and several months of imprisonment accused of complicity, at the end of which he was released. He tried to reopen the Modern School, but it was not possible, and the following year he moved to France and Belgium; in the latter country he founded the International League for the Rational Education of Children, whose honorary president was Anatole France. In 1908 he edited the magazine of the League L & # 39; Ecole rénovée in Brussels, but later moved it to Paris, where he resumed the activity of his editorial and continued editing the bulletin of the Modern School.. He came to believe that the figure of Alejandro Lerroux would be the one who embodied the "revolutionary principles" in the political arena.

Death and tributes

In 1909 Barcelona was a powder keg: the government had launched another chapter of what will be the catastrophic bloodletting of the war with Morocco for which more soldiers need to be recruited. The levy only affected the poorest reservists, since the children of the bourgeoisie and the rich were released by paying a quota. Government provocation and the socio-politically conscious environment of industrial Barcelona caused major riots in Barcelona that produced the episode of the Trágic Week. In June 1909 Ferrer had returned from England to see his sister-in-law and niece sick in Montgat. While in Barcelona, he is arrested, accused of having been the instigator of the dramatic revolt, on the pretext of his former relationship with Mateo Morral.

All the studies agree that Ferrer Guardia had no relation to the events, but that a series of interested institutions chose him as a scapegoat for the military courts to accuse and convict him without evidence. Thus, the process of Ferrer Guardia was full of arbitrariness and irregularities, a farce against which his defense attorney, Captain Francisco Galcerán Ferrer, could do little or nothing: none of the statements were accurate and they always spoke through third parties who claimed to have seen Ferrer directing the fire at religious buildings etc In the investigation, no testimony favorable to the accused was collected and during the trial no defense witness could be summoned (some of Ferrer's relatives and friends had been exiled to Alcañiz). The accusation included facts and actions from twenty years before. During the preparation of the summary, he did not have a lawyer, and when he did, he only had twenty-four hours to read the 600 pages of which it consisted. On the other hand, the parts of the summary that were most unfavorable to Ferrer were leaked to conservative newspapers (La Vanguardia, El Correo Catalán, El Noticiero Universal, El Universo or the weekly Cu-Cut!, close to the Regionalist League), thus fueling the press campaign that had begun the day after his arrest, on August 31, and which would continue even after he had been executed. Its purpose was to try to demonstrate that Ferrer Guardia had been the "director" and "inducer" of the rebellion of the Tragic Week, in order to also counteract the immediate international movement of rejection against Ferrer's prosecution.

Protest in Paris for the execution of Ferrer Guardia (17 October 1909).

Tip in the cemetery of Montjuic

Ferrer's own daughter sent a letter to King Alfonso XIII asking for clemency for her father, but received no response.

Very Christian King that for a knightly people symbolizes generosity and omnipotence, do not reject the humble and ardent supplication of Ferrer's daughter. O King, as God Himself, you can dispose of life or death, dispel by an outburst of your noble heart the bitterness of my soul and listen to the humble and ardent supplication.

Ferrer, found guilty before a military court, would be shot four days after the sentence, at 9 in the morning of October 13, 1909 in the Santa Amalia moat of the Montjuic castle prison. His last words were "Long live the Modern School!"

The reaction to the process against Ferrer Guardia caused great agitation in the foreign intelligentsia, although in the Spanish counterpart there would be hardly any echo, Ferrer counting that yes with the support of characters like Joan Maragall, Gabriel Alomar and Luis Simarro, the latter author of The Ferrer process and European opinion (1910). Among those disaffected by Ferrer's cause were Unamuno and Azorín, who attacked what they considered an anti-Spanish campaign in the European press. The trial against Ferrer has come to be interpreted in terms of the Spanish Dreyfus case. Unamuno had very harsh words with Ferrer Guardia, both in public and in private, going so far as to describe him in a letter to a third party as a "mamarracho », «mixture of crazy, stupid and cowardly criminal» and «monomaniac with delusions of grandeur and erostratism».

Following the trial and execution of Ferrer Guardia, The Times said: «Through negligence or stupidity, the government has confused freedom of instruction and conscience, the innate right to reason and express one's thoughts, with the right of opposition, assimilating it to a criminal agitation»... Anatole France in an open letter affirmed: «His crime is that of being a republican, socialist, freethinker; His crime is to have created secular education in Barcelona, instructed thousands of children in independent morality, his crime is to have founded schools »; and William Archer: "Ferrer's entire active life would have done less harm to Spanish Catholicism than the mere mention of his name does to it today."

On at least two occasions, in July 1910 and in March-April 1911, the request to review the process of Ferrer Guardia (and his consequent rehabilitation) was debated in the Madrid Congress, supported by the republican deputies and by the socialist deputy Pablo Iglesias, but in both it was rejected thanks to the votes of the two dynastic parties, the Conservative and the Liberal, and those of the Regionalist League. In December 1911, the Supreme War Council revoked the part of the sentence that had determined the confiscation of all the assets of Ferrer Guardia, considering him the "civilian responsible" for the fires and looting of the Tragic Week, for which they were returned. to his heirs.

Works

His best-known work is The Modern School.

A stone in the cemetery of Montjuic in memory of the anarchists Durruti, Ascaso and Ferrer.

Monolith in the Montjuic Mountain (Barcelona).

Ferrer i Guardia Foundation

The Ferrer y Guardia Foundation currently holds Ferrer's personal archive and the Publications of the Modern School, donated to the Foundation by his heirs. This monument is a replica of the one installed in memory of the anarchist pedagogue in 1911 in Brussels, exactly on Franklin Roosevelt Avenue, in front of the Free University of the Belgian capital.

In addition to the Francisco Ferrer i Guardia Foundation located in Barcelona, various public sites and cultural and educational institutions bear his name, such as the Francisco Ferrer Guardia Secondary Education Institute in San Juan Despí and Valencia.

Pop Culture

During the Civil War, the Borrás Theater in Barcelona bore his name, along with the Aribau Club, which, built by the libertarian unionists, was inaugurated with the name of Durruti, and the now-defunct Vergara cinema, which was inaugurated with the name de Ascaso, forming the so-called trilogy of the "martyrs" of the anarchist cause, as indicated by the tombstone built in the Montjuic cemetery in Barcelona.

On the Montjuich mountain in Barcelona there is a monolith and a statue placed in 1990 as a public recognition of the city of Barcelona to Ferrer Guardia. The placement of this monument was promoted by the Francisco Ferrer Guardia Foundation.