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  • Too Young to Fight:Anarchist Youth Groups and the Spanish Second Republic
  • Jordi Getman-Eraso (bio)

The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented mobilization of young people across Europe. A significant number of youth organizations emerged, set on achieving political and social objectives for their increasingly visible young constituencies. The youth phenomenon arrived in Spain later than in other countries due to the country's slower industrial and political development.1 Like their European counterparts, Spanish youth groups tended to be ideologically radical. They employed modern techniques of mass mobilization and resorted to violent rhetoric and political violence, which fit the dominant trend in Europe.2 However, Spanish anarchist youth groups, commonly referred to as juventudes libertarias (libertarian youth), differed in a very significant way from the rest of their Spanish and European contemporaries. Up until the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the established policy of the juventudes libertarias was to reject violence as a bourgeois-tainted and, thus, an unacceptable mode of action. Unlike other youth organizations in Spain and the rest of Europe, the anarchist juventudes were adamantly opposed to engaging in political violence, restricting themselves instead to "education and propaganda" duties. Yet, in the summer of 1936 these strongly held beliefs gave way to the practical realities of the Civil War, and led the would-be educators of the future utopian anarchist society to take up arms and fight.

Recent scholarship has generally attributed to youth organizations a decisive role in undermining the political structures of the Second Republic (1931–1936) and, by extension, contributing to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936.3 The young militants of these political organizations also directly participated in the fighting by joining in large numbers the militias and army units that waged war in battlefields across Spain. Moreover, they made up the bulk of the half million dead left behind by the fratricidal conflict.4 The outbreak of hostilities on July 19, 1936, saw the spontaneous mobilization of thousands of [End Page 282] young men and women associated with the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movement. Armed with any weapons they could find, young members of the anarchist youth groups Juventudes Libertarias de Catalunya (Catalan Libertarian Youth, or JLC) and Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias (Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth, or FIJL) fought hand in hand with other groups to defend the Republic and defeat the rightist golpistas across Spain in the first days of the war.5 In cities such as Barcelona, resisting the military coup quickly gave way to widespread spontaneous revolutionary acts that replaced established authority structures with the most radical experiment in self-rule in twentieth-century European history. Anarchist youth instigated many of the revolutionary actions in this early phase of social transformation.6 Within days, the same young anarchists departed for the front, where they made up the bulk of the militias fighting the Nationalist troops.7 The young activists' critical contribution to the war effort was venerated by the anarchist press. In early August 1936, the anarchist weekly Tierra y Libertad celebrated the anarchist youth for their valorous and determined contributions to the revolutionary cause:

[The youth] were the first to aim their rifles at the fascist iniquity. They were the first to take their posts at the barricades and the war fronts. They were the first to give their lives in exchange for the liberation of the Spanish proletariat.8

The anarchist youth's engagement in violent actions represented a sharp change in organizational policy. Just months before the rightist coup, organizational plenary meetings had ratified the anarchist youth movement's complete disassociation from violence.9 Violent conflict, the juventudes founding statutes stated, fell on the shoulders of its parent organizations, the anarchist Federación Anarquista Ibérica (Iberian Anarchist Federation, or FAI) and the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labor, or CNT).10 In May 1936, as violent political confrontations in Spain neared a point of no return, anarcho-syndicalists attending a CNT national congress deemed appropriate the juventudes' decision to not engage in "revolutionary actions."11 Even the FAI leadership, made up of many anarchist pistoleros (gunmen) notorious...

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