The Martyrdom of Ferrer: Being a True Account of His Life and Work

Front matter

THE MARTYRDOM OF FERRER

BEING A

TRUE ACCOUNT OF HIS LIFE AND WORK

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Since the Dreyfus case set France quivering with agitation and drew the earnest attention of the whole civilised world, no judicial or semi-judicial procedure has stirred the feelings of men and women so profoundly as the execution of Francisco Ferrer y Guardia. The eyes of Europe have been directed to Barcelona with a keenness and suspicion that has completely baffled the Spanish censorship. Strictures have been passed on the Spanish Government's conduct by grave bodies of lawyers in France and Belgium, and by some of the most authoritative Conservative journals in Europe; while a wave of popular indignation has fallen on Madrid with a force that has dislodged the Government from its position. By an inevitable reaction the Press of Europe has been employed by a corps of anonymous contributors to besmirch the memory of the dead man, and to vindicate those who are responsible for his death. While leaders of culture, such as Sudermann, Maeterlinck, and Anatole France, have branded the execution of Ferrer as a judicial murder, a flood of stories and documents has been poured out which, if one-half the statements were true, would place the Spanish Government in the position of the most tolerant power on earth for its long forbearance.

Which side in the great controversy is right? It is no academic question. If a man whose only object in life was to uplift his fellows by educating them, who had no share whatever in the violent outbreak which was put to his charge, has been hypocritically tried and executed by persons whose corrupt interests were endangered by his educational work, then a foul and repellent murder has been perpetrated. Such murders do stain the chronicles of nearly every country in Europe, but they belong to a barbaric past. If Spain has stooped to such a murder in the twentieth century, the tattered mantle of its pride must be stripped from its shoulders; the corrupt system which finds room or need for such a crime must be laid bare to the eyes of the world.

A sympathetic student of Spanish life and letters, I have endeavoured to ascertain the true story of Ferrer's life, work, and death. I have conscientiously considered the statements on both sides. I have scanned the columns of Spanish, French, Italian, Belgian, German, and English journals, and listened to the special pleadings of Roman Catholics, Conservative Spaniards, Freethinkers, Socialists, and Anarchists. I have, in a special visit to the Continent, closely examined men who had taught in Ferrer's schools—men who were in the midst of the tumult at Barcelona from July 26 to 29. I have plied Ferrer's intimate friends, some of whom are friends of my own, searched diligently for authoritative documents, submitted legal points to lawyers, listened to the pleas of opponents—in a word, made every conceivable effort to learn the truth. And that truth I now place before English readers in a plain narrative, with an enormous accumulation of proof.

The brief and astounding summary which I give here will be fully substantiated in the following chapters. I must ask the incredulous, shuddering reader to examine carefully the evidence I have gathered, and the counter-evidence which I analyse, before he allows his feelings to submerge his judgment. The number of English readers who understand Spain is exceedingly small. I trust that this plain and fully documented story of the real situation will prevent that fine and promising people from having its annals again stained, by those who hold power over it, with another such crime against humanity as the murder of Francisco Ferrer.

For Ferrer was murdered. He had no connection whatever with the fatal disturbances which recently wet the streets of Barcelona with blood. He was in England a few weeks before the outbreak, and intended to remain in England for some months. The news that a dearly-loved niece was dangerously ill caused him to return to Barcelona. The child died; but another accident, a request for information from Paris, detained him in Barcelona over the fatal day. He wrote to a friend from Barcelona in the midst of the riots—wrote as a spectator, wondering what would happen next. Every word of this was proved by his letters to intimate friends. And when those friends sent these decisive letters to his advocate at Barcelona they were stolen by the officials, and not suffered to be used in his defence.

Ferrer had for many years held aloof from politics. Of the two chief groups of advanced political enthusiasts in Barcelona, the Republicans and the Anarchists, neither recognised him as entirely belonging to them. His work was education alone, and not one line of his school-books has yet been quoted, with chapter and verse, in the journals of any country in support of the calumny that his schools taught violent rebellion. They did not. Ferrer had political ideals, which I will duly describe; but his personal task was to make the people of Spain competent to use their judgment on political, social, and religious subjects. With single aim and noble self-sacrifice he used a comfortable estate in providing the schools which the Government refuses—in view of its own laws—criminally refuses, to provide. For providing those schools he was murdered.

But who in modern Spain could seek a man's life for erecting schools in which violent insurrection was not suggested? Here is the second part of my task. By a similar collection of authoritative proof I have to show how education alone, without any inspiration of violence, endangered certain corrupt interests and moved high-placed men to perpetrate a thinly veiled crime. As far as the Roman Church is concerned, the task is not difficult. From time immemorial it has not argued with heretics, but burned them, where the conditions were medieval. The conditions are medieval in Spain. My evidence will show that it was the Barcelona clergy who first demanded that the riots should be put to the account of the founder of the Modern Schools. Other and most extraordinary evidence of the guilt of the Spanish clergy will be found in the pertinent chapter; but if I indicated its nature here apart from the evidence itself, the reader would deem it incredible.

At first sight I seem to have a more difficult task in extending the guilt to the statesmen of Spain. In reality, one who is acquainted with Spanish literature could fill whole chapters with weighty denunciations of the utter corruption of the Spanish political system. I will lay before the reader such proof, even in the words of Señor Maura himself, of that corruption that he will understand why Spanish politicians dread the educator of the people. I will show that the device of "suspending the constitutional guarantees"—or suspending civilisation—is a scandalous trick for throwing on legally incompetent military men the work of ridding the corrupt system of its critics without the inconvenience of a trial. I will show that the bomb outrages which are pleaded in justification are the work of the clergy and the civic officials. I will show that the witnesses against Ferrer—who were never cross-examined—would have failed ignominiously in any civil court, and that in a fair trial a mass of rebutting testimony would have been produced. All this was known to the Home Secretary, Señor La Cierva, the Prime Minister, Señor Maura, and they also knew that only a military council would condemn Ferrer. I warned them that the evidence would be produced when Ferrer was dead. They have been swept from office by the indignation and disgust of Europe, but the memory of a brave and noble-spirited man remains to be vindicated.

This is the gist of the story which the following chapters will tell and substantiate. England stirred to some purpose with effective anger and disgust when Papal and Austrian power fought their bloody fight to retain the domination of Italy; but no single deed was done by those Powers comparable in enormity to this; for Ferrer used the pacific weapon of enlightenment. England was not restrained by consideration of France's internal politics when a corrupt body attempted to consign Dreyfus to a living death; and a greater wrong was done to Ferrer than was contemplated against Dreyfus. Many English journals, dissenting from Ferrer's views, have nobly pleaded for justice in Spain's treatment of him. But many English journals have opened their columns to the lying and reckless statements of the Spanish and clerical agents, mantled with anonymity, who have set out to poison the mind of Europe, and who fancied that bold mendacity would suffice where proof was wanting.

This little work is not made up of the contrary assertions of anonymous informants. It is built on solid and analysable evidence. I never met Ferrer, and do not write under the influence of his great personal charm. I do not share the ideal of Anarchism—a system, however, which must not be confounded with the use of explosives—and do not write in defence of a school of thought. I write as one who, after laborious search for the true features of the case, feels that a man of noble aspirations has been murdered by corrupt politicians, at the instigation of an equally corrupt Church, and I trust that an exposure of their corruption will enable English men and women to keep in memory the name of one more man who has died in what he believed to be the cause of humanity, and to watch the course of events in Spain with more enlightened interest.

Chapter I. The Life and Aims of Ferrer

CHAPTER I.

THE LIFE AND AIMS OF FERRER

Francisco Ferrer y Guardia was born at Alella, in one of the quiet vine-clad valleys of Catalonia, January 10, 1859. Nothing in his origin gave promise of the distinguished career which has been brought to so tragic a termination. For half a century Spain had been washed with blood, and the new aspirations of Europe had fought valiantly for a place in its life. Over Spain had been spread the titanic struggle of Napoleon I. and England. To Spain the Holy Alliance had sent back the Catholic monarch, who, with a lying oath to observe the Constitution, had turned on his more enlightened subjects with a ferocity that far outran the "white terror" of France, Austria, and the Papal States. Over Spain had raged, when Ferdinand VII.'s bloody reign was over, the long and violent conflict of Liberals and Conservatives, Clericals and Anti-clericals.

No valley of Spain was so remote or so densely ignorant as to be insensitive to the prolonged and murderous conflict of the old and the new ideas, but it was only a vague and confused echo that rumbled in the ears of the peasantry. Usually only one man in their village could read—the priest—and the version he gave them of the distant battles was couched in the language of the seminary. The Liberals were the forerunners of Antichrist. The mouth of the pit had been suffered to open; the emissaries of Satan were then, in 1859, in power at Madrid. They had ventured, two years earlier, to pass a law of universal elementary education. So the small vineyard-owner Ferrer and his wife—from whom, by a pretty Spanish custom, the martyred teacher took the name of Guardia—shrank closer to their Church, looked on letters as more dangerous than wine or pretty faces, and bought their indulgences of the cura with a complete ignorance that Europe at large had trodden them underfoot three hundred years earlier.

One thing of import Francisco Ferrer, to keep the shorter name by which he will live, inherited from his parents—vigour of character. The cardinal mistake of English judgment on Spanish affairs is the belief that Spain is an outworn and decadent nation. It is a complete and fatal misunderstanding. The new ideas have had to fight a sterner battle in Spain than in any other country, except (in recent years) Russia, and the best blood of the country has been spilled like water. Yet the enthusiasts for progress have re-formed their shattered ranks decade after decade, and it is only by the unscrupulous and barbaric procedure, of which this story will give a vivid illustration, that the medieval abuses have been retained by Church and State. Spain does not lack vigour or ambition. But its vigour is in part paralysed by the deliberate refusal of education, and in part suppressed by an utterly unscrupulous political system and an apprehensive Church.

Seven years after Francisco's birth, in 1866, the reactionaries again resorted to the expedient of bleeding Spain to reduce its insurgent vigour. By that time Europe at large had fought and won the battle for freedom of ideas. The Papal monarchy was shrinking before the advance of enlightened Italy, while the English fleet encouraged the advance from the blue shores. But Spain, an isolated fragment of the Middle Ages, escaped or deceived the eyes of Europe, and perpetrated infamous deeds in defence of the ruling clerical and political interests. Even then Spain proved its vitality. The progressive forces, seeing that disunion had put them at the mercy of reaction, joined once more and effected a revolution. An Italian prince, Amadeo of Savoy, was called to the throne, but his foreign ways gave material to the malcontents, and Amadeo retired in mortification from his hostile kingdom. Then the Cortes (Parliament) proclaimed the Republic of 1873, by 258 votes to 32—a triumph won by the Progressists, it must be remembered, after seventy years of war and brutal persecution.

It is at this period that the son of the vineyard cultivator in the quiet Catalonian valley comes to years of discretion. Devoid of education, living in a family of fanatical orthodoxy, the lad had no encouragement to lean towards rebellion. His brother José was a young iconoclast, it is true, with a destructive aversion for objects of piety. But Francisco was quiet and respectful. I do not labour the obscure details of his boyhood. We have graver matters to consider. All that one need note is that, as Francisco advanced into youth, his younger spirit responded to the cries that echoed from over the hills, and he began to differ profoundly from his father. At the age of thirteen he was sent to Barcelona, some twelve miles away, to take service in a drapery establishment. The proprietor had known religious persecution, and his anticlerical temper was communicated to the industrious and intelligent boy, who became a great favourite. By his twentieth year he openly declared himself Republican, and the family link was broken. A few years later he joined the Freemasons.

It is important to understand Ferrer's early revolutionary career, because some of the documents which were embodied in the charge against him belong to this early period. Those who framed the charge were well aware of the real nature of these documents. They knew the recent history of Spain, and the part that Ferrer had played in it. But few people outside the country are acquainted with the stirring and complicated story of Spain's political development in the later nineteenth century, and Ferrer's murderers found it possible to surprise foreigners with revolutionary documents and insist, mendaciously, that they were of recent date. They belonged to Ferrer's early manhood, and were curious relics of a phase in his career that he had long outlived.

The figure in Spanish political life that caught the eye of the young Catalonian was that of Ruiz Zorrilla, the brilliant and passionate leader of the Republican Progressist party. Zorrilla had been one of the leading spirits in the revolution of 1868, and had then joined in the importation of Amadeo of Savoy, under whose short reign he occupied the post of Minister of Public Instruction. Ferrer was destined to enter into close co-operation with him, and in Zorrilla's anti-clerical, Republican ideal and zeal for education one can see the early source of his inspiration. If the reader finds the atmosphere of rebellion unfamiliar, I must remind him of the long decades of bloody persecution that the Church and the old dynasty had perpetrated, and must ask his reserve until later chapters have set before him the repellent features even of the actual Church and political world. Spirited and enlightened men, when they had no interest in the existing caucus, or refused to put self before humanity, were muttering rebellion all over Spain. The reign of Charles I. in England was not a juster ground of revolt.

When Amadeo was driven out and the Republic of 1873 was set up, Zorrilla went to Paris and declared that he renounced politics. He returned to Spain, however, when the army destroyed the short-lived Republic and enthroned Alfonso XII. He then formed his Republican Progressist party, and worked with remarkable success. The army had made or marred revolutions, and the army must be republicanised; so he pushed his propaganda with great effect among the military. Francisco Ferrer, who had left his home on account of his advanced ideas, was now an inspector of railways, and was in a position to render important service by conveying the secret communications from centre to branch.

This was in the early eighties—Ferrer's early twenties. Undoubtedly he was then devoted to the cause of violent revolution, and any document that merely implies such a sentiment—setting aside the gross and clumsy forgeries which involved murder and pillage—can very well be admitted for this early period. It was only through a very natural ignorance of this period of Ferrer's career that English people were persuaded to accept them as sentiments of the mature Ferrer. We shall see immediately how his ideas evolved. Revolution was a familiar thing in recent Spanish history. There had been seven revolutions in the preceding seventy years, and those who desired the remedying of Spain's repellent maladies turned instinctively to that method.

This period of Ferrer's life culminated in 1885. That was the year of the abortive revolution led by General Villacampa, and Ferrer took part in a local Catalonian rising. The insurrection was suppressed. General Villacampa was condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to deportation by the Queen Maria Christina; a point worth remembering in view of the statement that a Spanish monarch has no such prerogative. France, as usual, received the fugitives, and both Zorrilla and Ferrer settled in Paris, where Ferrer filled the honorary position of secretary to Zorrilla.

In this decade of life in Paris we have a second and very interesting period in the young man's career. I need not dwell long on the material details. With the inevitable limitations of a foreigner, he found life hard at first, and attempted to obtain subsistence as a commission agent. The occupation failed, and it is difficult to trace his movements for a few years. What is clear is that, after a time, we find him in the position of professor of languages at the Philotechnic School in Paris. A writer in Le Temps remembers him as "a man of iron will, and especially an idealist... a model professor, giving excellent lessons in a very original manner." He is described as "a man of medium height, very nervous and refined, with extraordinary eyes, like live coals, and a look that one could never forget." His lessons were much sought, and he made lasting and devoted friends in the French metropolis. One who knew him there a few years later tells me that he had a comfortable and refined home, using his resources with great ability and moderation. Since he had first become conscious of his lack of culture, he had studied most assiduously, and held a high position as teacher. It is another element that enters into the ideal of his later life.

That ideal slowly took shape in the pacific, intellectual atmosphere of Paris. I wish to speak with the most complete candour on the important aspects of Ferrer's personality and ideals. Skulking under the disguise of anonymity, there are writers who have shamefully traduced a murdered man, and nothing that one can say will escape misrepresentation in the cheap Roman Catholic journals. But I am laying my case before those men and women who would form an honest judgment on this great crime, and it is my duty to place before them the facts as I know them. I have examined half-a-dozen intimate friends of Ferrer on the evolution of his ideas. It is unfortunate that he wrote no work from which one can learn his mature views. An elementary Spanish grammar is his only literary work. But there are passages enough in his letters and journal to bear out entirely the judgment I formed, after closely questioning his friends, on his later views.

I must say at once that the statement of some of his less intimate friends, that he came to hold views akin to those of Tolstoy or those of our English Quakers, is denied by those who knew him better. On the other hand, there is not the slightest doubt that, after his long sojourn in Paris, Ferrer ceased to advocate, counsel, or in any way encourage violent insurrection. I have spoken fully on the matter with his intimate Anarchist friends, and the utmost that any of them claimed was that he did not go out of his way to condemn other people's methods. His method was that of education. Do not let me be misunderstood. He did not educate without an ulterior ambition. He trusted that an educated Spanish nation would put an end to that corruption of Church and State which I will presently describe, and which fills modern Spanish literature with laments. But he nowhere, either directly or indirectly, suggested or counselled violence. He held aloof from active participation with any political party in Barcelona, and was absorbed in his schools.

This will be quite apparent as we follow him through the last decade of his career, but it is important to establish that he went back from France to Spain with no intention to engage in political work. We shall see the nature of the "evidence" against him on this point later. It has not the shadow of a particle of value. For the moment I will give a few of the many weighty testimonies to his real views and disposition.

The first testimony is his own explicit declaration, published in the Barcelona Republican weekly, Fructidor, February 8, 1907. He had been asked to furnish an account of the origin of the Modern School, and, in referring to the idea which inspired it, he said: "When Zorrilla died I lost all my confidence, which had been already much weakened, in the results of a revolution effected by superficial revolutionaries who were themselves the victims of much the same prejudices as the monarchists whom they would deprive of power. From that time forward I devoted all my activity to the task of establishing a school which, in my humble opinion, might serve as a model for all the schools which advanced bodies were endeavouring to found, in order to preserve the child from the mendacious teaching of the official schools. That was the origin of the Modern School." This emphatic repudiation of revolution, in a Republican paper, to be read by his friends of all parties in Barcelona, is decisive. It was not submitted at his "trial." It is supported by the testimony of all who knew him.

As I go to press an important article on Ferrer appears in the Nineteenth Century (November). The writer, M. Naquet, is not only a high Parisian authority, both from the cultural and the political point of view, but he knew Ferrer well, and had given material assistance to Ruiz Zorrilla in his revolutionary campaign. He was in close touch with Ferrer during the fifteen years he spent in Paris, and later, and describes their relations as "of the most fraternal character." Further, M. Naquet himself openly advocates the removal of corruption and abuses in Spain and Russia by violent methods. His authority is, therefore, quite apart from his well-known personality, extremely great, if not decisive. And this is what M. Naquet writes on the subject: “Ever since the days when he acted as the lieutenant of Don Zorrilla, Ferrer's point of view had undergone profound modifications. The successive checks to all the Spanish conspiracies in which he had been involved, and his deeper study of the domestic quarrels which had ruined the Spanish Republic of 1873, had imparted a new direction to his political ideas. He had arrived at the conclusion that the employment of violence is useless; that, despite its apparent swiftness, it is the slowest method in the end. Without going to the length of accepting the doctrine of resignation, or accepting the passive-resistance theory of Tolstoy—he was far from that—he believed that the surest and quickest way to progress was that pacific way which consists in transforming by means of education the conceptions of one's contemporaries.” These are not the ideas of M. Naquet, when there is question of such countries as Spain and Russia, nor do the words express a mere inference in regard to Ferrer's development. The point was often debated between the two friends, and to Naquet's contention the younger man used to reply: “Time respects only those institutions which time itself has played its part in building up. That which violence wins for us to-day another act of violence may wrest from us to-morrow. Those stages of progress alone are durable which have rooted themselves in the mind and conscience of mankind before receiving the final sanction of legislation. The only means of realising what is good is to teach it by education and propagate it by example.”

These were the real sentiments of the man who was shot on the charge of having led or inspired a violent rising of obviously hopeless character; and M. Naquet expressly adds that these ideas took deeper and deeper root in the mind of his “noble friend” in the later years. But, the astonished reader will ask, why was not the testimony of so authoritative a man as Naquet brought forward at his trial? Listen. “I communicated this crucial fact,” M. Naquet proceeds, “to his noble defender, Captain Francisco Galcerán, but he was not allowed to read my letter, any more than the others which were received from England and France in exculpation of his client.” We shall see that this is only one of the “crucial facts” that were suppressed by the servants of the Spanish State and Church.

Another French writer who knew him, André Morizet, gives the same testimony in L’Humanité. “Intellectually,” he says, “Ferrer was not one of us. He was one of those who prove refractory to all ideas of organisation, and expect the renovation of the old world solely by the development of freedom of conscience... He not only kept aloof from the action of political parties, but even Trades Unionism had little interest for him.” The last phrase must not be taken too strictly, however.

From distant Italy comes the same testimony. In an article in La Ragione (Rome, October 10) Oddo Marinelli writes: “Fifteen years in Paris, in constant expectation of the revolution which was to regenerate his country, had caused him to lose all hope that Spain would rise again through the efforts of revolutionaries... Having taken part in the many attempts at revolution engineered by Zorrilla, he came to the conclusion that the education of the child alone would lead to the betterment of men and to the dawn of happier days for his unhappy country.” Marinelli adds that Ferrer wrote (May 27, 1907) from his prison cell to a group of Barcelona youths: “Do not let us play with words. Liberals, Republicans, or Anarchists—these were, and are, words to be avoided by us who march with all our hearts towards the ideal of human regeneration.”

These concordant testimonies are a few out of the many that have been published, and agree entirely with the words of the seven or eight personal friends of Ferrer with whom I have spoken. We shall find him, true to that ideal, looking on, passively and wonderingly, when the crowds are seething about him in the fatal days of July at Barcelona. The fifteen years of study, observation, and reflection at Paris had induced him to turn from revolutionary ways to an ideal of education. Of “revolution” he still spoke and wrote frequently; but he always said “social revolution.” He gained belief in the power of ideas. To the end he had cherished friends of the revolutionary school. He did not criticise their hopes and methods, but followed his own.

A distinguished Anarchist said to me: “To the Republicans he was an Anarchist; to the Anarchists he was a Republican.” It is the finest statement of the political position he had reached. The works of Professor Reclus and Prince Kropotkin had a fascination for him. With them he believed—little wonder after his experience of the Spanish political world—that a decentralised administration of a nation's affairs, leaving the maximum of liberty to the individual, was the best ideal of society. This is the real gist of Anarchism. Its accidental alliance in a few cases—about one in a thousand Anarchists in Spain, a Spanish Anarchist tells me—with the use of dynamite must not blind us. As a social ideal it has a right to plead at the bar of public discussion like any other. But the work to be done immediately in Spain was to educate, and Ferrer eschewed political organisation to turn teacher.

He was then nearing his fortieth year. A teacher of merit in a small institution, unknown to the world, he moved restlessly under the burden of his ideal. The great contrast of France and Spain saddened him. The Spanish law of universal education was a comedy, as we shall see. Two-thirds of the Spaniards could neither read nor write at the beginning of the twentieth century. Only a few million could both read and write. One-third of the population of Madrid were utterly illiterate. In such a soil corruption throve vigorously. The reflection, the contrast, burned into Ferrer's mind, and made education his constant day-dream. How was a young man of no fortune and no authority to educate a people, to fight the hostile influences of both Church and State? And suddenly an unexpected stroke of fortune put a powerful weapon in his hand, and he flew back to Spain to establish his now famous schools.