Ferrer Between his 1901 return from Parisian exile and the 1906 attempted regicide, the outsize influence and rapidity of the rise of anarchist educator Francisco Ferrer worried Spanish authorities, who moved quickly to repress him. Ferrer's school threatened many Spanish social foundations with its antimilitary, antireligious, antigovernmental curriculum and other subversive activities. The conservative government and
Catholic church each regarded the school as a hotbed for insurrectionary violence and heretical blasphemy, respectively. Ferrer was subject to police surveillance and harassment at home and denigrated in the press. Authorities used the 1906 regicide attempt as a pretext to stop Ferrer. He was arrested within a week of the attack and charged with both its organization and recruiting of Morral. Ferrer was imprisoned for a year while prosecutors pursued evidence for his trial. The anarchist and pseudonymous writer
Juan Montseny led Ferrer's legal defense. He attempted to recruit the jurist
Gumersindo de Azcárate, who declined upon reviewing the preliminary evidence and concluding that Ferrer was guilty. Prosecutors had no easy case against Ferrer. In casting him as the bombing's mastermind, they relied on his ties to anarchism and revolutionary propaganda and proposed that Ferrer both fostered Morral's insurrectionism and suggested that Morral approach Nakens based on Ferrer's high regard for the journalist's works. However, in correspondence between the educator and the anti-anarchist journalist just days before the bombing, the latter declined an offer from the former to write books for his school—while the two were cordial, Nakens regarded himself as an outspoken enemy of anarchism. In reply, Ferrer insisted that Nakens keep the money, perhaps intended as a bribe. The court was not convinced of conspiracy by this evidence. For his part, Ferrer proclaimed his innocence. He told the investigators that he and Morral had limited interaction and that he did not know Morral was a revolutionary or even in Madrid. Finding the evidence against Ferrer to be circumstantial, the court acquitted Ferrer, but not before impugning Ferrer's character and political activities: morally reprehensible but within the scope of
their Constitution's freedom of expression. International pressure also played a major role in his release. Anarchists and rationalists likened his treatment to another
Spanish Inquisition. While Ferrer was jailed, the republican
Alejandro Lerroux oversaw the estate and with the funds started periodicals dedicated to Ferrer and Nakens' release. But while
Emma Goldman proclaimed that Ferrer was known for his aversion to political violence, the historian Paul Avrich has countered that Ferrer was a militant anarchist, proponent of
direct action, and cognizant of the political importance of violence. Historians have disagreed on Ferrer's role in the regicide attempt. The
Oxford University historian concluded, based on Spanish and French police official records, that Ferrer had provided the funds and explosives as the mastermind of both bombing attempts who sought to foment a revolution. His analysis, however, took these police documents at face value when such official narratives are notorious for their fabrications from vindictive informants and conceited reporters. In this case, the police had already proven their opposition to Ferrer by twice attempting to implicate Ferrer prior to the Alfonso XIII bombings, both times unsuccessfully. In addition, Romero Maura's same documents (and others since lost) had been insufficient at Ferrer's trial. Ferrer had, however, introduced Morral to Barcelonean radicals, such as Lerroux. Some evidence suggests that Ferrer introduced Morral to a bomb expert, and that both Ferrer and Lerroux plotted a regicide to destabilize the administration and cause a revolution. Morral also had access to the school's vast collection of revolutionary propaganda. "Barring the discovery of conclusive evidence," historian Paul Avrich wrote, "Ferrer's role in the Morral affair must remain an open question." Ferrer's school was a casualty of the Morral affair, closed by the government within weeks of his arrest. Multiple conservative deputies of the
Spanish parliament additionally petitioned to close all secular schools but were denied. Despite Ferrer's acquittal, the police continued to believe he was guilty. Ferrer continued his advocacy for rational education and syndicalist causes following his release in June 1907 but was arrested and charged in August 1909 with leading the week of protest and insurrection known as
Tragic Week. Though he likely participated in its events, he was not its mastermind. The ensuing trial, which would culminate in his death by firing squad, is remembered as a show trial by a
kangaroo court, or as the historian Paul Avrich later summarized the case, "
judicial murder": a successful attempt to quell an agitator whose ideas were dangerous to the status quo, as retribution for not convicting him in the Morral affair.
Nakens On the day of Morral's death, the republican journalist José Nakens had published a denunciation of the regicide attempt and terrorism writ large in his journal,
El Motín, without mentioning Morral or Nakens' own harboring of the fugitive. He was arrested within the week and the next day published a full accounting of his actions in two newspapers, in which he reaffirmed his opposition to anarchism, described Morral's attack as cowardly, and recanted his brief support of Morral as misguided but driven by his desire to help his fellow man. The judgment in Nakens' case came easily. While the court believed that Nakens had no prior connection with Morral, they found that his planning for Morral was more deliberate than a brief lapse of judgment. They argued that this aid led to the Torrejón villager's murder, and for this aid, sentenced Nakens to nine years of prison and financial restitution for the Royals, the military, and families affected by the bombing. Nakens' friends Bernardo Mata and Isidro Ibarra were jailed as well. Only half of the prison time between their June 1906 arrest and June 1907 sentencing was commuted. In Madrid's
Cárcel Modelo prison, Nakens became an advocate for
prison reform as a campaign mounted for his pardon. His advocacy for more humane prison conditions, through regular reports in a republican daily newspaper, improved his standing with those previously upset by his harboring of Morral. Following a multifaceted campaign of letters, press, and testimony from prison officials, Nakens and his friends were pardoned in May 1908.
Others On the afternoon of the attack, both Ferrer and the republican partisan Alejandro Lerroux awaited news from Madrid while seated at separate tables in the same Barcelona café. However, while Lerroux denied involvement in and knowledge of the plot, he sat at the café having followers ready to storm the
Montjuïc Castle. Lerroux's fate turned for the better with the affair. Before the attack, he had fallen out of political favor, lost his periodical, and struggled for money, but afterwards, he was flush and the executor of Ferrer's estate.
Legacy Episodes such as the Morral affair showcased Spanish republican ability to galvanize popular support through political drama in an age of lethargy towards formal politics. It also spotlighted Spanish republican fissures that would become an identity crisis as Nakens impatiently broke from the
gradualist philosophy of the old generation of republicans and both republican factions showed intransigence towards cooperation. The affair appeared even to favor the republican moderates (Azcárate,
Nicolás Salmerón), who condemned the radical, young republicans (Lerroux,
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez) and made Nakens appear, by juxtaposition, to be unstable. This schism appeared to hasten the coming revolution. In hindsight, historian Enrique Sanabria proposes Nakens as a tragic parable in that Nakens' decision to hide Morral reflected a willingness to work with revolutionaries, which ostracized him from his more moderate republican colleagues. Nakens was naive to believe that his messages of egalitarianism, democracy, and cultural revolution would not appeal to the leftists he sought to avoid, and his popularity within anarchist and radical circles would not reflect anticlericalism's status as a uniting force across the left. However, while anticlericalism was attached to nationalism for republicans like Nakens, it was not necessarily attached for anarchists and socialists. Nakens "became political roadkill" in the aftermath of the affair for his inability to draw an audience of workers while tolerating their revolutionary politics. == References ==