Between July 16 and 17, 1936, General Francisco Franco mutinied among his military garrison in Morocco, leading a coup against the Republic. A few days later, the two main unions (CNT and UGT) called a general strike in response to the military uprising and state apathy. Simultaneously with the war, however, libertarians created popular, non-state administrative structures and developed collectivization. The International Brigades, fighters from around the world, flocked to support the Republic, counterbalancing the support Hitler and Mussolini gave to the Falangists.
At the height of the war, the Stalinists imposed the normalization of collectivization processes and repressed dissident anarchists and communists.
Songs accompanied the battles and victories of Iberian libertarians. Those words, 90 years later, allow us to relive the struggles, hopes, and blood shed by libertarian Spain in those years.
1 CHORALE DURRUTI - ¡A LAS BARRICADAS!
2 LUDD - THIS OUR LIFE
3 LETIZIA FUOCHI - BLANCA MARIPOSA
1 Chorale Durruti - ¡A las barricadas!
The most famous anarchist song of the Spanish Revolution translates as "To the barricades!" A song that has spanned eras and continents, reinventing itself across genres and generations, still sung and known today. " To the barricades! To the barricades! / by the triumph of the Confederation ." It is an anthem of the CNT (National Confederation of Labour), an anarcho-syndicalist organization founded in Spain in the 1910s, which inherited the Bakuninist legacy from the times of the First International, which would play a fundamental role in 1936-39. With over a million members, this union would promote collectivization and block the advance of the coup plotters. " The most precious thing is freedom / you have to defend it with faith and valor ."
The tune to which these words are sung is that of Warsavianka (or Varshavjanka), a Polish fighting song born way back in 1879, which probably harks back to a song of the same name from 1831. The tune could come from a Russian folk song, and it is precisely in anti-tsarist Russia that the song, translated from Polish, became a symbol of the First Revolution of 1905.
It goes without saying that every revolution and every revolt always has a minimal dose of adventure in its narrative. Songs are born, accompany, and fuel these struggles, but it's not always easy or possible to reconstruct their exact origins. Until a few years ago, it was unclear how an Eastern European anthem had arrived in Spain, even before the International Brigades, but thanks to Riccardo Venturi, we now know a lot about " A las barricadas ." This anthem was in fact written in the early 1930s by Valeriano Orobón Fernández, a young anarcho-syndicalist who published the first lyrics of the song in the CNT-FAI weekly in November 1933. It was called Marcha Triunfal , and "To the barricades!" was only the subtitle, but subversive and sung memory would forever consecrate the latter as the "official" name of the piece. In the following years, Valeriano endured several prison terms and, having fallen ill, died in 1936, before Franco's coup. Anarcho-syndicalists named a battalion that fought on various fronts in his memory, as well as a subversive group active in 1968 under Franco. On the website "Songs Against War," " A las barricadas " is a fitting chapter on the huge Warsavianka page , where the song and its variations can be found in (almost) every language in the world. And it is there that Riccardo Venturi tells us how the anti-Tsar tune reached the ears of his Spanish comrades. It is all thanks to Alfred Schulte, a German anarcho-syndicalist who visited his Spanish comrades in 1932 and was hosted by Valeriano and his wife, Hildegart Taege, of German origins. Valeriano also spoke that language and had translated Rudolf Rocker's biography of Max Nettlau for the Iberians.
In reconstructions of popular and protest songs, attention is often paid to the harshest chants that subversives chanted in marches, or to the newspapers and pamphlets that circulated between strikes and workplaces, or to the complaints of law enforcement officers who intercepted rebel chants. Too often, however, we forget that every revolutionary carries his or her struggle songs in his heart, even singing them to himself in the shower or bathtub. And it was precisely there that " A las barricadas" was born; Valeriano Orobón Fernández heard it sung by Alfred Schulte while he was freshening up, and the anarcho-syndicalist interrupted him in his intimate moment to write the lyrics he sang. Together with his wife, the anarcho-syndicalist translated it into Spanish, giving us the lyrics we still know today. This song opens the album Chants anarchistes de la guerre d'Espagne , recorded in France by the Chorale Durruti (a libertarian youth group from Paris with French, Spanish, and Bulgarian men and women), which collected the movement's most famous songs, from those preceding the war to those written on the front against the Falangists. The album was reissued on CD in 2018 by stella*nera, Ateneo degli Imperfetti of Marghera, and the Centro Studi Libertari of Milan. The booklet contains the lyrics and the story of how it came into the hands of Italian comrades in the first assemblies of the CNT in the months following Franco's death.
" En pie el pueblo obrero, a la batalla / hay que derrocar a la reacción" (On the people of workers, to the battle / they must destroy the reaction ). A song that still resonates today with the Kurdish experience of Rojava in hip hop adaptations, or Scandinavian black metal covers, "Alle barricate!" It still makes us sing in very different ways, at all latitudes but always with the same rhythm.
2 Ludd - This Life of Ours
Immediately after the generals' coup against the Republic, the organization of military defense began. The anarchists, and all revolutionary forces, therefore had to fight to win the war and consolidate the revolution. The Iron Column, for example, operated on this basis and with this perspective, formed in early August 1936 by 3,000 militiamen. As the months passed, the CNT and FAI also accepted the militarization of the militias requested by the Madrid government. The Iron Column would be the one that resisted this imperative the most, paying a very high price for it. " And time flew by / and fatigue did not enter my body / and my enthusiasm increased / and I became reckless / and in the morning I went out to look for my enemy / and... all this to change life / to give another rhythm / to this life of ours ." These words come from "Protest before the libertarians of the present and future on the capitulations of 1937 ," which appeared in installments in the FAI newspaper "Nosotros" in March 1937, and became the lyrics to a song by Ludd. The poetic passage, without direct or explicit references to the Spanish events, is found on the first pages of the text signed by "Un «incontrolado» della Colonna di Ferro," published in Italian by Nautilus (second edition, 2006), with which the Turin publishing house inaugurated its editorial journey in the 1980s. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in the shadow of the Mole, between the 1990s and 2000s, an hard rock-straight edge band was active who chose precisely Columna de Hierro as their name . Ludd's old-school hardcore lyrics certainly don't lack important historical, political, and poetic references, and this song is no exception: " So that men can be brothers / so that joy, at least once / exploding in our chests / could explode on Earth / So that the revolution / could be a reality ." The song is included on their second album, "È tempo di partire," which opens with "Io li odio i nazisti dell'Illinois" by the Blues Brothers in Proteggimi , and continues with " 18 Marzo 1921," dedicated to the Kronstadt sailors' commune, with lyrics taken from news reports of the time, where we also find excerpts from poems by Montale and Ingeborg Bachmann. On the CD, they make it clear that their militant hard rock only plays in "self-managed situations: no political parties or unions, no sponsors or institutional funding." Their most recent album, "Un silenzio vivente ," features the famous photo of a Spanish militiawoman from 1936 smiling proudly with the city in the background, featured on the cover in a magnificent collage.
3 Letizia Fuochi - Blanca Mariposa
"La scelta" is a 2025 album released by singer-songwriter Letizia Fuochi. The title refers to the moment and decision that led men and women to fight fascism. The cover's gaze, featuring the colors of the Spanish flag (purple, yellow, and red), already hints that it won't just be about the 1943-45 Resistance in Italy. " Blanca Mariposa " is a song, also sung in Spanish, that recounts the Spanish Civil War and the violence of the Falangists. " Walls peeled by time from dreams / Smell of red-hot bullets / Dust on the mouth in memories / Rubble of the soul / Shivers of fear, blood, and glory / And on the Rambla they shoot again ." The work of the singer-songwriter (a historian by training), published by Materiali Sonori, is the result of research through books, archives, and testimonies. Letizia Fuochi, through song-theater, takes these stories where a school lesson couldn't reach, as she herself states. In Blanca Mariposa, we can hear the participation of Francesca Breschi, former singer in Giovanna Marini's vocal quartet. " History of Spain, bizarre creature / Intertwining of the sacred and the profane / You unsheath the cross, then kiss the sword / And bless your sins / Dirty hands, sated belly / While the earth dies of hunger ."
And after recalling the role of the Church in the oppression of the Spanish and its support for Franco, another verse sums up the bombing of Guernica and Picasso's iconic painting: " April 26, market square, / the Condor legion is arriving. / It darkens the skies, / demonstrates its strength by bombing, / and the faint cry of the horse / looks at us and speaks to us again ."
En.Ri-ot
https://umanitanova.org/cantare-la-rivoluzione-spagnola-note-bandite-resistenza-13/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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