Today in Labor History June 7, 1896: Anarchists supposedly set off a bomb during a Corpus Christi parade in Barcelona, Spain. As a result, a dozen people died and thirty were wounded. No one knows who actually set off the bomb, but the government blamed anarchists, who had set off numerous bombs over the previous four years. Consequently, the government went on a witch-hunt, arresting and torturing dozens of anarchists in the infamous Montjuich Prison. However, many leading anarchists denied the accusations and said they would never have set off a deadly bomb in a working-class community like this. They reserved their attacks for members of the ruling class. Nevertheless, the government tried and executed five anarchists, all of whom proclaimed their innocence. They sentenced 67 others to life in prison. Worldwide protests erupted in response. Montjuich Prison was graphically depicted in the opening scene Victor Serge’s epic novel, Birth of Our Power, which he wrote while imprisoned in the Soviet Union for his opposition to Stalin.
Today in labor history April 28, 1896: Tristan Tzara was born. He was a Romanian-French poet, journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, film director. He co-founded the anti-establishment Dada movement. During Hitler’s rise to power, he participated in the anti-fascist movement and the French Communist Party. In 1934, Tzara organized a mock trial of Salvador Dalí because of his fawning over Hitler and Franco. The surrealists Andre Breton, Paul Éluard and René Crevel helped run the trial. In the 1940s, Tzara lived in Marseilles with a large group of anti-fascist artists and writers, under the protection of American diplomat Varian Fry. These included Victor Serge, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Andre Breton and Max Ernst. Later he joined the French Resistance, writing propaganda and running their pirate radio station. After the Liberation of Paris, he wrote for L'Éternelle Revue, a communist newspaper edited by Jean-Paul Sartre. Other contributors to the newspaper included Louis Aragon, Éluard, Jacques Prévert and Pablo Picasso. Varian Fry, and his communal home for radicals in hiding, was portrayed in the historical drama series “Transatlantic.”
Today in Labor History April, 21, 1913: Andre Soudy and Raymond Callemin, members of the anarchist Bonnot Gang, were executed. Callemin had started the individualist paper "L'anarchie" with author and revolutionary Victor Serge. The Bonnot Gang was a band of French anarchists who tried to fund their movement through robberies in 1911-1912. The Bonnot Gang was unique, not only for their politics, but for their innovative use of technology, too. They were among the first to use cars and automatic rifles to help them steal, technology that even the French police were not using. While many of the gang members were sentenced to death, Serge got five years and eventually went on to participate in (and survive) the Barcelona and Soviet uprisings. Later, while living in exile, Serge wrote The Birth of Our Power, Men in Prison, Conquered City, and Memoirs of a Revolutionary.