Francisco Ferrer

Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia was born January 10 or 14, 1859, on a farm near Barcelona in Alella, Spain. He became a republican and freethinker in his youth. While his parents were pious Catholics, he grew independent and anti-clerical convictions from his freethinker uncle and militant atheist first employer.

During his mid-20s, Ferrer had become a radical Republican. In 1883, he was initiated into the Masonic Lodge Verdad in Barcelona (Lodge Number 146 of the Gran Oriente de España, under the leadership of Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla), taking on the symbolic name, Brother "Cero", he reached the 32°.

He used his position as a train conductor on a route between France and Barcelona to transmit messages for the exiled Republican leader Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla and shepherd republicans, radicals and freemasons to sanctuary. After supporting an attempted coup under General Manuel Villacampa del Castillo who intended to install a Spanish Republic in late 1886, Ferrer was himself forced to flee to France with his wife and three daughters, where they would stay for 16 years. While in France, Ferrer kept up his masonic activities with the Grand Orient de France.

Ferrer separated from his wife, Teresa Sanmartí, and later had relations with a friend of the woman whose inheritance funded the Barcelona school. He then fell in love with a teacher at his Escuela Moderna, Soledad Villafranca.

The rapidity of Ferrer's rise in influence troubled Spanish authorities. His monetary inheritance and organizing ability amplified his subversive efforts, and authorities viewed his school as a front for insurrectionary sentiment. Ferrer represented peril to many social institutions—the church, the state, the military, the family, gender segregation, property—and the conservatives who wished to preserve them.

During the school's early years, Ferrer adopted principles of anarcho-syndicalism, a philosophy of worker co-ownership that grew in prominence during this period. He published La Huelga General (The General Strike), a syndicalist journal, between 1901 and 1903, and worked to organize the Catalonian revolutionary labor movement and promote direct action. Ferrer led a parade of 1,700 children for secular education on Good Friday in April 1906.

Ferrer was intimidated and vilified for his work in Barcelona. Police raided his house and tailed his movements. He was subject to slanderous public rumors to tarnish his reputation, including intonations of gambling, financial speculation, and hedonism. Ferrer's various romantic relations with women were presented as indications of his school's moral lessons.

In 1905, Ferrer and the Modern School voiced their opposition to bullfighting, cautioning against using abolition of the practice as a means to stoke political nationalism.

He was held in association with the 1906 assassination attempt on Spanish King Alfonso XIII, but ultimately released under international pressure the next year. The assassin, Mateo Morral, was a 25-year-old anarchist, well-educated and from a wealthy family, who worked at the school's press. While the attempt itself—the second in two years—was unsuccessful, it was successful as the pretense for deposing Ferrer. He was arrested in June 1906 on charges of planning the attempt and persuading Morral to perform it. Within two weeks, state authorities closed the school due to its association with Morral and Ferrer. Conservative members of lower house of Spain's legislature unsuccessfully proposed that all secular schools be closed for their promotion of antisocial behaviors. For a year Ferrer awaited trial, where he was acquitted for lack of proof.

Ferrer's role in the Morral affair remains indeterminate, as of 1985. Ferrer was a militant anarchist, contrary to his proclamations otherwise, who believed in direct action and the usefulness of violence. The Spanish authorities attempted to connect Ferrer with two assassination attempts prior to Morral's. The Oxford historian Joaquín Romero Maura credits Ferrer with coordinating the Morral assassination attempt and a similar attempt a year earlier. Based on papers from French and Spanish authorities, Maura argues that Ferrer supplied the bombs and funds for the attempt to provoke insurrection. These types of official records from this period, however, were famous for their partiality and, even before some evidence from the case went missing, were altogether insufficient for conviction in Ferrer's time.