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Anarchism and Illegality in Barcelona, 1931–7

A century ago Friedrich Engels reflected that if a European league for barricade-building was established, Barcelona would emerge in top position. The same deep rebellious traditions of the Catalan capital prompted the English hispanophile Gerald Brenan to describe Barcelona as ‘the most revolutionary city in Europe’. The 1930s confirmed this reputation: during the years assessed in this article barricades were thrown up in the working-class districts of Barcelona on at least eight different occasions. What is interesting, however, is that although the local authorities and business groups were understandably perturbed by the threat of social mobilisation, the proven capacity of the security forces to contain the challenge of the barricades meant that the danger of urban insurrection was not the greatest continuing worry of the ‘law-and-order’ lobby. Instead, the dominant concern of the self-proclaimed ‘lovers of order’ in Barcelona was the wave of armed illegality (atracaments) which rocked the city throughout the 1930s.1