El Puerto de Santa María and other towns in Cadiz and Lebrija in Seville, gathered on the outskirts of the city. Armed only with sickles, scythes, pitchforks and sticks but driven by hunger, they invaded the city centre. In part, they were intending to free dozens of workers recently imprisoned after the Mano Negra trials. Their battle cry was ‘Brothers, we are coming for you!’ However, parallel uprisings in several other towns of the province of Cadiz suggested Grávalo’s wider revolutionary purpose. The braceros briefly held Jerez, although their belief that the local military garrison would join them was entirely misplaced. Their triumph was short-lived and the police swiftly regained control. Two innocent passers-by, a commercial traveller and an office worker, had been killed by elements of the mob in an outburst of class hatred. Because they were well dressed and wore gloves, they had been assumed to be ‘oppressors’.22 Fear of the spectre of revolution provoked by the Jerez events ensured that the consequent repression would be severe and extend right across western Andalusia. In subsequent military trials, despite lack of concrete evidence, other than the testimony of Grávalo obtained under duress, four labourers were condemned to life imprisonment. Four more were sentenced to death and executed by garrotte in the market place of Jerez.23
One of the consequences of the repression was the creation of an anarchist martyr in the form of the saintly Fermín Salvochea. He was accused of being the brains behind the entire event in Jerez despite already being in prison. In 1873 he had been Alcalde of Cadiz and had long been a target of the authorities who were frightened by his immense popularity. In April 1891, they had shut down his newspaper La revolución social and, after the May Day celebrations, arrested him. While in jail, he had been visited by the organizers of the Jerez invasion whom he had tried to dissuade from what he saw as a suicidal project. It was claimed that he was behind the assault on Jerez via ‘El Madrileño’ who was deemed to be his puppet. Several prisoners were taken out and tortured so that they would declare that Salvochea had offered the support of the anarchists of Cadiz for the Jerez operation. He was sentenced to twelve years’ hard labour but was amnestied in 1899 after serving for eight years.24
The knowledge that confessions had been obtained by torture intensified the spread of anarchism in other parts of Spain. In particular, in Barcelona there were numerous acts of solidarity with the Andalusian labourers which in turn provoked state violence in the form of indiscriminate arrests, torture and executions in the Catalan capital. Initially, anarchist efforts to emulate the terrorist campaigns taking place in France and Russia were notable for their incompetence.25 On 24 September 1893, as a direct response to the repression in Jerez, there was a failed attempt on the life of the Captain General of Barcelona, Arsenio Martínez Campos, who, it will be recalled, had led the military coup that had restored the monarchy in December 1874. He was noted for his open hostility to the workers’ movement. The bomb attack during a parade in honour of the patroness of the city, the Virgin of Mercy (La Mare de Déu de la Mercè) was the beginning of three of the bloodiest years of terrorism in Barcelona. One Civil Guard and several horses were killed and sixteen people badly injured. Although Martínez Campos was thrown from his horse and had shrapnel in his leg, he was otherwise unharmed. The would-be assassin, a thirty-one-year-old printer and father of three, Paulí Pallàs, a member of an affinity group, made no attempt to escape and was arrested on the spot.
It is an indication of the inefficiency of the police that Pallàs was the first author of a bomb outrage to be caught. He was arrested and tried five days later. He declared that his only regret was not to have succeeded in killing ‘that reactionary representative of the abuse of power’. He was sentenced to death on 30 September 1893 and executed by firing squad on 6 October. A huge crowd gathered and some of those present were heard to shout, ‘Long live dynamite!’ and ‘Long live anarchy!’ Pallàs’s execution was the beginning of a major repression. In subsequent years, the police persecuted his wife, who had known nothing of his plans. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, sixty anarchists were arrested and six innocent men were executed on 21 May 1894, on the grounds of a non-existent complicity with Pallàs in the attack on General Martínez Campos. Two of them had been in prison at the time and one of those, Manuel Ars i Solanellas, would be avenged years later by his son Ramón in the assassination of the Prime Minister Eduardo Dato. Over the next two years, more than 20,000 men and women were imprisoned, many to be tortured. The blind lashing out by the police confirmed the working-class view that the state had declared war on them. At the same time, Pallàs was regarded in anarchist circles as a martyr. His last words were allegedly ‘Vengeance will be terrible!’ and calls for his death to be avenged began to be heard in anarchist circles. The bloodiest possible revenge would soon be carried out in the temple of the Catalan bourgeoisie, the Gran Teatre del Liceu.26
Terrorism was facilitated by the fact that, until 1895, the poorly paid and inadequately led police in Barcelona lacked a photographic archive and even a basic filing system. Its consequent incompetence was compensated for by its brutality. Despised by the working class, it was known as the ‘muddle’ or the ‘stink’. It was not until September 1896, after one of the most extreme terrorist attacks, in the Carrer dels Canvis Nous, that the Conservative government of Cánovas del Castillo responded to the protests of prominent citizens and created a specialist unit or brigade for the investigation of political and social crimes. Given the inefficiency of the police, the government relied increasingly on the army. The high command considered that the only valid response to the threat of anarchist terrorism was blanket repression. Indiscriminate brutality hit those elements of the anarchist movement that condemned violence. The anarchists were already virulently anti-militaristic for both theoretical reasons and in response to the appalling experience of conscripts and their families who paid the cost of unjust colonial wars. As one anarchist newspaper declared: ‘If the bourgeois want war, all they have to do is enlist and go to Cuba.’ Repression exacerbated anarchist hostility to the army.27
Within one month of the execution of Paulí Pallàs, one of the most dramatic outrages took place on 7 November 1893, at the Gran Liceu de Barcelona, the opera house frequented by the wealthy bourgeoisie. Since there had been various warnings of an anarchist attack, to attend the opera in evening dress was an act of provocative irresponsibility. Before a packed house of 3,600 people, a performance of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell opened the season. At the moment in Act 2 when William Tell swears he will free his country from oppression, the anarchist Santiago Salvador i Franch hurled two Orsini bombs from the fifth-floor balcony into the high-priced stall seats. Fortunately, only one exploded but, even so, twenty people died including a fourteen-year-old girl and nine women and a further thirty-five were injured by shrapnel, shards of glass and flying splinters from smashed seats. It was estimated at the time that had both bombs gone off, the death toll would have been massive.28
The subsequent repression was carried out implacably by the fifty-eight-year-old General Valeriano Weyler, who was appointed Captain General of Catalonia on 5 December 1893.29 After more than 400 virtually indiscriminate arrests, six innocent men were put on trial. They were condemned to death after confessions of complicity in the attack on Martínez Campos had been secured by torture. Those death sentences were meant as a warning to the anarchists of the serious determination of the authorities to clamp down on terrorism. Santiago Salvador was not captured until 1 January 1894. A petty criminal of violent tendencies, he had previously been arrested for robbery and fighting. His family background was murky. In 1878, when he was thirteen, he had tried to murder his father, a notoriously violent man who was subsequently shot by the Civil Guard in 1891. In early 1893, Salvador had been badly beaten by the police in Valencia after which he is alleged to have said: ‘every blow that I received would cost tears of blood’. He denied that his action was meant as revenge for the execution of Pallàs. Yet, at another time, he claimed that ‘The death of Pallàs had a terrible effect on me and to avenge him, as a tribute to his memory, I decided to do something that would scare those who had derived pleasure from his death and thought that they no longer had anything to fear. I wanted to disabuse them and also enjoy myself.’
Salvador told a journalist that, after the explosion, he had remained in the street outside the Liceu to rejoice in the panic of the bourgeoisie. He had hoped to go to the funeral of the victims on 9 November to throw more bombs into the crowd of mourners, but his alarmed comrades refused to supply him with the necessary explosives. He and two others were not tried