Anselmo Lorenzo

Anselmo Lorenzo Asperilla (21 April 1841 – 30 November 1914) was a Spanish anarchist activist and writer. He is known for his leading role in the early stages of the Spanish anarchist movement, for which he became known as "the grandfather of Spanish anarchism".

Lorenzo was first exposed to radical politics in the 1860s, when he was introduced to republicanism and federalism. Following the Glorious Revolution of 1868, he became a founding member of the Spanish Regional Federation of the International Workingmen's Association (FRE-AIT) and was elected to its federal council at the 1870 Barcelona Workers' Congress. He was at the centre of a split between the anarchist and Marxist factions of the AIT, which culminated in him resigning as the organisation's general secretary. He then established a number of clandestine cells of the AIT in Andalusia, which became the nuclei for revolutionary activity during the Cantonal Revolution. After the suppression of the revolution, he came into conflict with the AIT's moderate faction of syndicalists, who forced him out of the organisation before reorganising it into the Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region (FTRE).

During the 1880s, Lorenzo turned to writing and became an exponent of the theory of anarchism without adjectives, which advocated for an end to political infighting in the anarchist movement. In 1894, he launched his own newspaper, La Ciencia Social, but it was shut down during the Montjuïc trials and he fled into exile. Following the Spanish defeat in the Spanish-American War, Lorenzo called for anarchists to adopt a new strategy and formulated the tendency of anarcho-syndicalism. He also became involved in the Barcelona Modern School and observed the Tragic Week uprising. In 1910, Lorenzo participated in the foundation of the National Confederation of Labour (CNT), which went on to become the predominant anarchist organisation in Spain. He died following the outbreak of World War I.

Anselmo Lorenzo Asperilla was born in 1841, in the Castilian city of Toledo, into a working-class family. At a young age, he went to live with his uncle in Madrid, where he went to work as a typographer. He attended events at the Fomento de las Artes cultural centre, where he was introduced to new ideas on progressive politics. Here, Lorenzo became interested in federal republicanism and read the works of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Francesc Pi i Margall. In the 1860s, Lorenzo attended a series of lectures by Juan Serrano Oteiza, who first introduced him to the idea of revolution.

Following the Glorious Revolution of 1868, Lorenzo attended a small meeting of federalists organised by the Italian anarchist Giuseppe Fanelli. Fanelli spoke to them in the French and Italian languages, neither of which Lorenzo understood, but he was nevertheless able to follow his expressive and animated speech about the exploitation of labour and revolution. Over the following weeks, Lorenzo continued to attend Fanelli's speeches and have conversations with him, gaining his favour. He would later become a subject of Lorenzo's works, along with Tomás González Morago, considered the first Spanish anarchist.

On 24 January 1869, the small group of painters, printers and shoemakers constituted the Madrid section of the International Workingmen's Association (AIT). Lorenzo attempted to convince Fanelli to stay with them, but he refused, telling Lorenzo that it was up to them to self-organise towards collective action. Their new organisation quickly grew, gaining 2,000 members during its first year of operations and publishing the newspaper La Solidaridad, which Lorenzo co-edited. As the Madrid AIT grew, Lorenzo sought to give it some organisational structure and recruited some Freemasons, who he described as the organisation's "auxiliaries". At the 1870 Barcelona Workers' Congress, delegates from throughout the country established a Spanish Regional Federation of the AIT (FRE-AIT) and elected Lorenzo to its federal council, alongside Morago, Enrique Borrel [ca], Francisco Mora [es] and Ángel Mora. By this time, all of them had already joined Mikhail Bakunin's International Alliance of Socialist Democracy (AIDS), which effectively controlled the new FRE-AIT. Lorenzo was disturbed by the alliance between anarchists and reformists in the Barcelona section of the FRE, and believed it would have been better if the AIDS had educated the trade unionists on how to obtain agreements through collective direct action.

Following the rise of Amadeo of Savoy to the Spanish throne in December 1870, AIT members were increasingly targeted for political repression by the new government. In June 1871, Lorenzo and Morago fled the country and took refuge in Lisbon, taking the records of the FRE-AIT with them. In the Portuguese capital, they helped establish a Portuguese Federation of the AIT, before returning to Madrid three months later. During their brief time in exile, divisions began to emerge between the anarchist and the Marxist members of the federal council, respectively led by Morago and Mora. The federal council of the FRE-AIT subsequently collapsed and Lorenzo found himself doing most of the organisational work. In September 1871, the Valencia Conference of the FRE-AIT reorganised the fractured federation into a decentralised federation of trade unions and regional groups. This caused the organisation to break down into bureaucracy, with Lorenzo estimating that 7,500 people would have been required to staff all its committees and councils. That same month, Lorenzo travelled to London for an AIT conference, where he met Karl Marx and witnessed the first signs of a coming split between the anarchists and Marxists. When he returned to Spain, he failed to inform the FRE what was happening in the AIT, which allowed the French Marxist Paul Lafargue to begin inculcating the FRE-AIT with Marxist doctrine. Lafargue established a Marxist grouping within the Madrid section of the FRE, which attracted printworkers such as Pablo Iglesias, José Mesa [es] and briefly Lorenzo himself. Together they used the newspaper La Emancipación to advocate for Marxism in the Spanish labour movement.

In April 1872, the FRE-AIT held its Zaragoza Congress, where delegates made attempts to mend the divide between the anarchists and Marxists, and elected Lorenzo as the general secretary of a new federal council. In the weeks after the congress, internal conflict between the two factions quickly resumed. Lorenzo came to believe that the AIDS had failed to organise the working class towards collective action, as Spanish workers did not yet have experience in mass organisation. Other anarchists on the federal council became suspicious of Lorenzo, due to his friendship with Paul Lafargue. When they went through Lorenzo's mail and questioned him about his allegiances, he resigned from the federal council. Despite this, he remained an anarchist and a member of the FRE-AIT. Later that spring, the federal council dispatched Lorenzo to Andalusia to establish clandestine cells of the organisation that could carry out an insurrection against the state and resist political repression. If they were to carry out a successful insurrection, Lorenzo directed them to establish revolutionary juntas, which he said should exclude "bourgeois elements" such as the liberals and federalists if it were possible. He reported back that the FRE-AIT had experienced rapid growth in the region, with viable groups having been established Cádiz, Carmona, Jerez, Málaga and Seville, and smaller groups in Aguilar and Córdoba. While he was in Seville, AIDS members brought him to the city's prison to meet the incarcerated local anarchist leader Nicolás Alonso Marselau [es]. In 1873, these Andalusian FRE-AIT cells played a small part in the Cantonal rebellion, although this would ultimately be suppressed by the forces of Arsenio Martínez Campos and Manuel Pavía.