Buenaventura Durruti

In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Durruti and the second or maternal family name is Dumange.

Buenaventura Durruti
Durruti in 1936
Birth name	José Buenaventura Durruti Dumange
Born	(1896-07-14)14 July 1896 León, Spain
Died	20 November 1936(1936-11-20) (aged 40) Madrid, Spain
Buried	Montjuïc Cemetery
Allegiance	CNT-FAI
Service	Los Justicieros (1920–1922) Los Solidarios (1922–1924) Confederal militias (1936)
Years of service	1920–1936
Commands	Durruti Column
Known for	Anarcho-syndicalism, Anti-fascism
Battles / wars	Spanish Civil War Battle of Barcelona Battle of Ciudad Universitaria
Spouse(s)	Émilienne Morin
Children	Colette Durruti
Relations	Pedro Durruti (brother)
Signature

José Buenaventura Durruti Dumange (14 July 1896 – 20 November 1936) was a Spanish insurrectionary, anarcho-syndicalist militant involved with the CNT and the FAI in the periods before and during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. Durruti played an influential role during the Spanish Revolution of 1936 and is remembered as a hero in and by the anarchist movement.

Early life

Childhood and education

José Buenaventura Durruti Dumange was born on 14 July 1896, in the Santa Ana neighbourhood of León; he was the second of eight children, born to Santiago Durruti and Anastasia Dumange. Durruti came into the world at a time when the Spanish colonial empire was collapsing, while the country itself was experiencing peasant revolts in Andalusia and a wave of industrial actions in Asturias, the Basque Country and Catalonia.

Durruti began his primary education at the age of five; his teacher described him as a mischievous but good-natured child. Durruti later remarked that he had been made into a rebel at an early age. At the age of six, in 1903, he witnessed the arrest of his father during a tanners' strike. Led by his uncle Ignacio, the strike lasted for nine months before it was finally defeated by the employers. Durruti's family was left destitute afterwards, as many of its members were boycotted or blacklisted for supporting the strike. Despite their limited means, Durruti's parents endeavoured to provide him and his siblings with an education. During his secondary education at a school, although his teacher had seen intellectual potential in him, Durruti proved to be a below-average student. His grandfather Pedro had hoped he would continue his studies at the University of Valladolid, but at the age of fourteen, Durruti decided to train as a mechanic and move into the workforce.

Trade union activism

In 1910, Durruti began his apprenticeship under the tutelage of Melchor Martínez, a master mechanic and a local leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE). Martínez oversaw Durruti's development as both a mechanic and as a socialist; during this period, Durruti stopped attending church and other religious events, which earned him a bad reputation among the city's Catholic population. After two years, Martínez informed Durruti that he had nothing left to teach him and pressed him to move on. He spent the subsequent year at a workshop that assembled machines for mineral processing, after which he qualified as a lathe operator. In April 1913, Durruti joined the Metalworkers' Union of the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) and became a prominent local union organiser. Like other workers in his union, Durruti came under the tutelage of the Leonese socialist theoretician Iglesias Munís, but before long became impatient and dissilusioned with the socialist party leadership. Durruti came to reject electoral politics in favour of revolutionary socialism, which caused tension between him and the party leadership; during this time, he would often remark that "socialism is either active or isn't socialism".

Following the outbreak of World War I, Spanish neutrality enabled the country to experience an economic boom. As his workshop was unable to keep up with demand, Durruti was dispatched to Matallana, where he would oversee the installation of mineral processors on-site. A few days after arriving, the Asturian miners went on strike in protest against workplace bullying by one of the engineers, demanding he be dismissed. Durruti led his team of mechanics in a solidarity action, refusing to assemble any machinery until the miners' demands were met. This forced the management to concede to the workers demands. Impressed by his conduct, Durruti's name quickly spread among miners in Asturias, who referred to him as the "big one". After he finished his job and returned to León, he was reprimanded for joining the strike by both his boss and his union leaders; Martínez urged him to leave León or else face persecution by the Civil Guard. His father secured him a new job as a mechanic for the Northern Railway Company (CCHNE). Following a nationwide general strike by the UGT in August 1917, the CCHNE fired its entire workforce, breaking the power of the railroad workers' union. In an attempt to regain its position, the UGT expelled many of its more revolutionary young members, including Durruti, who was finally forced to leave León. Wanted for conscription evasion, Durruti fled to Xixón, where sympathetic Asturian miners facilitated his escape to France in December 1917.

Throughout 1918, Durruti kept moving between the cities of Occitania, while keeping in touch with family and friends in León. During this time, he came into contact with the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), an anarcho-syndicalist trade union. Through the CNT, he adopted the political philosophy of anarchism, which he identified with his own revolutionary approach to socialism. In January 1919, he returned to Xixón and exchanged information about the CNT's activities in France with local activists that had overseen its growth in Asturias. He officially joined the CNT while working as a mechanic in La Felguera, before heading to La Robla, where Asturian mineworkers were on strike. He then attempted to meet up with some old Leonese friends in Santiago de Compostela, but was arrested by the Civil Guard, who discovered he had evaded conscription. He was brought before a Court Martial in Donostia, but with help from friends and his sister Rosa, he managed to escape back to France. By June 1919, he was working as a mechanic for Renault in Paris, from which he kept up correspondence with Leonese anarchists. His friends kept him up to date with the development and growth of the CNT in Spain, prompting him to return to the country in early 1920.

Anarchist activism

He then arrived at San Sebastian, Basque Country, just across the border. Here, he was introduced to local anarchists such as Suberviola, Ruiz, Aldabatrecu or Marcelino del Campo, with whom he formed the anarchist paramilitary group Los Justicieros ("The Avengers"). In 1921, during the inauguration of the Great Kursaal in San Sebastian, members of this group attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate King Alfonso XIII.

Shortly after Buenasca, the then president of the recently formed anarchist controlled Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), persuaded Durruti to go to Barcelona to organise the workers there where the anarchist movement, as well as the syndicalists, were being brutally suppressed and most of its members jailed or executed. Here, with Juan García Oliver, Francisco Ascaso, Miguel Garcia Vivancos, Alfonso Miguel, Ricardo Sanz García, and Aurelio Hernandez, he founded Los Solidarios ("The Solidarity"), one of the most famous of the so-called grupos de afinidad. In 1923 the group was also implicated in the assassination of Cardinal Juan Soldevilla y Romero, as a reprisal for the killing of an anarcho-syndicalist union activist Salvador Seguí. After Miguel Primo de Rivera seized power in Spain in 1923, Durruti and his comrades organised attacks on the military barracks in Barcelona and on the border stations near France. These attacks were unsuccessful and quite a few anarchists were killed. Following these defeats, Durruti, Ascaso and Oliver fled to Latin America. They subsequently travelled widely, visiting Cuba and carrying out bank robberies in Chile and Argentina.

Durruti and his companions returned to Spain and Barcelona, becoming an influential militant group within two of the largest anarchist organizations in Spain at the time, the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), and of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). The influence Durruti's group gained inside the CNT caused a split, with a reformist faction under Ángel Pestaña leaving in 1931 and subsequently forming the Syndicalist Party.

In the Civil War

Working closely with his comrades in the FAI and CNT Durruti helped to co-ordinate armed resistance to the military rising of the Nationalist faction, an effort which was to prove vital in preventing General Goded's attempt to seize control of Barcelona. During the battle for the Atarazanas Barracks, Durruti's long-time comrade and closest friend Ascaso was shot dead. Less than a week later, on 24 July 1936 Durruti led his armed militia, the Durruti Column, from Barcelona to Zaragoza. After a brief and bloody battle at Caspe (in Aragón), they also halted at Bujaraloz and at 'Venta de santa Lucia', Pina de Ebro. On the advice of a regular army officer, postponing an assault on Zaragoza.

The famous quote, "We renounce everything except victory", is associated with Durruti but this phrase was created by the CNT and never spoken by Durruti himself.

Death

In November, having been persuaded to leave Aragón by the anarchist leader Federica Montseny on behalf of the government, Durruti led his militia to Madrid to aid in the defence of the city. On 19 November, he was shot while leading a counterattack in the Casa de Campo area (see also Battle of Madrid).

Antony Beevor in The Spanish Civil War (1982) maintains that Durruti was killed when a companion's machine pistol went off by mistake. He assessed that, at the time, the anarchists lied and claimed he had been hit by an enemy sniper's bullet "for reasons of morale and propaganda". The first rumor of his death was that he was shot by his comrades because he enforced discipline.

Durruti died on 20 November 1936, at the age of 40, in a makeshift operating theatre set up in what was formerly the Ritz Hotel. The bullet was lodged in the heart; the diagnosis recorded was "death caused by pleural haemorrhage". In his later book Durruti in the Spanish Revolution, it was alleged that Durruti was killed by a 9mm bullet to the thorax. The autopsy reported:

"Durruti had a very developed chest. Given the topography of the thorax, I realized that the diagnosis that surgery was impossible had been mistaken. An operation could have produced positive results, although doubtlessly the patient would not have survived."

Following a large funeral procession, he was buried in Barcelona's Montjuïc Cemetery.

A few hours after Durruti's death, in reprisal, José Luzón Morales ordered the execution of 52 policemen who had been held captive in a monastery in Calle de Santa Engracia.

Personal life

On 14 July 1927, Durruti met French anarcho-syndicalist, writer and shorthand typist Émilienne Morin at the Librairie internationale anarchiste (International Anarchist Library) in Paris. They became life partners until his death. When Durutti was expelled from France in July 1927, Morin accompanied him into Belgium, and worked to feed them both when he was unemployed. The couple travelled to Spain in 1931 and on 4 December 1931, their daughter Colette Durruti was born in Barcelona. Morin brought Collette up virtually single-handedly, with the help of an anarchist friend, Teresa Margaleff due to Durutti's absences. In 1936 Morin ran the press office for the Durutti Column and wrote many articles for French anarchist publications on the situation in Spain. She returned to France after Durutti's death, remaining heavily involved in anarchist politics and writing, and worked to raise funds for Spanish refugees in France.

Legacy

At first, Durruti's death was not made public, for morale reasons. Durruti's body was transported across the country to Barcelona for his funeral. Over a half million people filled the streets to accompany the cortege during its route to the Montjuïc Cemetery. It was the last large-scale public demonstration of anarchist strength of numbers during the Spanish Civil War.

Hugh Thomas remark, "the death of Durruti marked the end of the classic age of Spanish anarchism. An anarchist poet proclaimed that Durruti’s nobility while living would cause ‘a legion of Durrutis’ to spring up behind him".

In 1937, as a response to the further participation of the CNT-FAI in the Republican government, and after the May Days in 1937 in Barcelona, the Friends of Durruti Group was founded, to try and save the anarchist principles of the revolution. The name of Durruti clearly taken because of the revolutionary commitment and the symbol that he still was for that in the anarchist camp. The Friends of Durruti group had a newspaper called El Amigo del Pueblo (The Friend of the People) and tried to make revolutionary propaganda among the rank and file of the CNT. The group was however fiercely repressed by the reformist wing of the CNT, in collaboration with the Republican government.

A Situationist group of Strasbourg University students spent their student union's budget on a giant flyposted comic strip in 1966. One of its panels, featuring two cowboys discussing philosophical reification, was called The Return of the Durutti Column [sic], in reference to Durruti's military unit. This, in turn, influenced Tony Wilson's naming of his English post-punk band, The Durutti Column.

Willem van Spronsen, an American anarchist who was killed in 2019 while trying to disable a fleet of buses operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for mass deportation, used Durruti's surname as a part of his alias.

Gallery

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  Photograph of Durruti
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  Funeral of Durruti, Barcelona, 23 November 1936
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  Durruti's grave full of flowers on the 69th anniversary of his death
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  Durruti's grave at Montjuïc Cemetery, Barcelona
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  "Hálito Durruti", monument to Buenaventura Durruti in his hometown of León

See also

• Anarchism in Spain
• Anarchist Catalonia

Bibliography

• Alexander, Robert J. (1999). The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. London: Janus Publishing Company. ISBN 978-1-85756-400-6.
• Bayer, Osvaldo (2015) [1975]. The Anarchist Expropriators: Buenaventura Durruti and Argentina's Working-Class Robin Hoods. Oakland, California: AK Press. ISBN 978-1-84935-223-9. OCLC 908088288.
• Bookchin, Murray (1978). The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868–1936. Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-090607-3.
• Beevor, Antony (2006) [1982]. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-2978-4832-1.
• Comotto, Agustín (2022). The Weight of the Stars: The Life of Anarchist Octavio Alberola. AK Press. ISBN 978-1-84935-409-7.
• Enzensberger, Hans Magnus (2018) [1972]. Anarchy's Brief Summer: The Life and Death of Buenaventura Durruti. Translated by Mitchell, Mike. Seagull Books. ISBN 9780857426000. OCLC 1077270536.
• Fraser, Ronald (2001) [1984]. "The popular experience of war and revolution 1936–9". In Preston, Paul (ed.). Revolution and War in Spain 1931–1939. London: Routledge. pp. 225–242. ISBN 0-415-09894-7. OCLC 803661954.
• Graham, Helen (2002). The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-45932-X. OCLC 464890766.
• Loadenthal, Michael (2017). "Anarchism". In Joseph, Paul (ed.). The SAGE Encyclopedia of War: Social Science Perspectives. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publishing. pp. 60–64. ISBN 978-1-4833-5989-2.
• Paz, Abel (2006) [1996]. Durruti in the Spanish Revolution. Translated by Morse, Chuck. Edinburgh: AK Press. ISBN 1-904859-50-X. LCCN 2006920974. OCLC 482919277.
• Preston, Paul (2006). The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-32987-9.
• Ruiz, Julius (2014). The 'Red Terror' and the Spanish Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107054547.
• Shantz, Jeff (2009). "Durruti, Buenaventura (1896–1936)". In Ness, Immanuel (ed.). The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 1–2. doi:10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp0482. ISBN 9781405198073.
• Thomas, Hugh (2001) [1961]. The Spanish Civil War. New York: Modern Library. ISBN 0-375-75515-2.

Further reading

• Acerete, Julio C. (1975). Durruti (in Spanish). Editorial Bruguera. ISBN 978-84-02-04322-1. OCLC 1977102.
• Amodia, Jose (1995). "Durruti Dominguez, Buenaventura". In Lane, A. Thomas (ed.). Biographical Dictionary of European Labor Leaders. Vol. 2. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 283–284. ISBN 978-0-313-26456-6.
• Goldman, Emma (1936). "Durruti is Dead, Yet Living".
• Guérin, Daniel, ed. (2005). "Durruti and Libertarian Warfare". No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism. Translated by Sharkey, Paul. Oakland: AK Press. pp. 619–652. ISBN 1-904859-25-9. LCCN 2005930956. OCLC 1156129943.