By VALERIA DOS SANTOS GUIMARÃES*
Foreword to the recently released book by Ana Paula Neves Oliveira
It was October 13, 1911 when readers of one of the many anarchist newspapers published in Brazil, The Lantern, came across a striking cover illustration. In the center, at the top, the ideal flag, a clear allusion to the Republic, waves behind a monument erected to the Catalan Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, ironically better known by his name in Spanish, Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, the language of the same nation that condemned him to death.
A muse surrounds his bust, offering the hero a laurel branch of victory, while the statue's penetrating gaze, on which the entire scene converges, stares steadily at the observer. A woman dressed in typical Catalan attire – a light blouse with a skirt, a dark apron over it, a scarf on her head and another over her shoulders – stands at the feet of the statue, probably an allegory of Catalonia.
Everyone praises the monument, including school-age boys and girls, arms raised to offer it laurel branches, eyes converging on the inscription “Childhood at the beginning of rationalist teaching”, a set that constitutes a truly epic scene.
The caption places the image in a particular chronology, linked to the most important achievement of the honoree, the inauguration of the first Modern School in 1901, and his death in 1909. Francesc Ferrer's Modern School advocated a secular pedagogy and soon found followers, multiplying not only in Spain, but throughout the world, including Brazil. The pentagram surrounded by a laurel wreath at the base of Ferrer's bust, therefore, reaffirms the symbols of secular education.
The only outlier is clearly a symbol of the Church: a bishop who turns his back to the scene, in a dismayed posture, arms crossed, one hand holding the Bible, another with a clenched fist raised to his mouth, casting a look between anger and fear out of the corner of his eyes, with an enormous cross hanging from his cassock evoking the Inquisition.
the cover of Lantern, however, did not have all the drama of the original image by Fermín Sagristá, himself an anarchist who used the printed pages of several libertarian newspapers as a platform for his critical illustrations, heir to a long tradition of political satire, a boldness that, by the way, earned him imprisonment and persecution. The pioneering version was colorful and terribly impactful. It was precisely one of the ones that led him to spend long months in Spanish dungeons, despite protests that united in unison in defense of the already famous artist.
In it, a blood red dyed not only the flag of the ideal or the scarf covering the back of the female allegory of Catalonia, but also ran down the columns, took over the shoulders of the somber religious figure and soaked his feet. Capable of causing a strong impact in the black and white of cheap newspapers, in color the drawing conveyed even more vehemently an agonizing clash between Reason and Faith, Republic and Monarchy. Everything there exalted much more than a school and a theorist of a new pedagogical line.
Spain had known a brief Republic (1873-74) that failed in less than a year under the yoke of the Bourbon Restoration Monarchy. Erecting a monument to Francesc Ferrer, therefore, was much more than exalting the symbol of anarchist and anticlerical education to face the indigestible reflux of the oppressive Catholic Church, the official religion of that State, the only tolerated cult, the only creed authorized to govern official education.
A monument of this type was not just a way of resisting an oppressive educational model. It was much more than that; it was a cry against the ignorance to which the majority of the population – the working poor – had been subjected for centuries. The return of the Monarchy, which threatened republican values, found a space for struggle in the defense of the concepts of the Modern School. Its mere existence terrified not only the Church, but also the Crown, and the weight of the intolerance of the monarchical State was consolidated in the execution of the Catalan, which was unable, however, to kill his ideas, elevating him, on the contrary, to the status of a martyr.
The general dissatisfaction coming from 98 Generation, of which Francesc Ferrer was also, in a certain sense, a product, condensed the dissatisfaction of public intellectuals engaged in the obstacles to that modernity that stubbornly refused to be realized. His figure was also a pole of attraction for the entire apparatus of violent repression of anticlerical slogans that manifested themselves in the control of unions and schools seen as centers of dissemination of social and political resistance.
As Ana Paula explains in her book, the height of this escalation of fear and bloodshed occurred during the Tragic Week of Barcelona (July 26 to August 2, 1909), whose slogans were not those of Francesc Ferrer, but rather of the most varied groups, from democratic republicans to anarchists. Of the thousands who took part in that cathartic eruption without a commanding voice or direction, united in revolt and frustration, in resistance and misery, in hatred and resentment, Francesc Ferrer was just one more, and not its ideologist as they tried to make us believe. Many were arrested, but only five received the death penalty, among them Francesc Ferrer.
His proposal for a new libertarian school that encouraged dreams as opposed to the dark nightmare of fear and sin, happiness instead of atonement and guilt, the full realization of the individual as opposed to castrating submission, gender equality as opposed to subservience to the patriarchy, the soft light of reason as opposed to the heavy darkness of fanaticism and faith, seemed to bring together everything that was most threatening to the established power of Alfonso XIII in that effervescent political and intellectual milieu. And so the execution took place, not to kill a man, but to kill what he signified.
The unjust accusation of being involved in the assassination attempt on the Spanish King Alfonso XIII in 1906 or the clear persecution brought against him for allegedly being one of the masterminds of the Tragic Week, which culminated in his conviction to capital punishment, shows how lethal his pedagogy was for conservatives from the ranks of the Monarchy and the Catholic Church.
The Lantern, armed with its anticlerical and combative motto, explicit in the subtitle, exalted Francesc Ferrer, as did the book The Universal Substance by Albert Bloch and Paraf Javal, which provided support for rational education and enabled students to become “capable of resisting the assaults of superstition” (Lantern, SP, 13/10/1911).
It also recorded the force with which this new model spread like wildfire: founded in the first year of the new 20th century, Ferrer's Modern School “soon absorbed or reorganized a large number of schools that had been established in Catalonia and other parts of Spain” (Lantern, SP, 13/10/1911) and just eight years later there were more than 150 of them in Catalonia alone, ten in Barcelona, and others in Madrid, Seville, Granada and even in other countries such as Portugal, Holland, Italy, reaching the South American continent, more precisely Brazil.
Through a periodical press that took the issue of social injustice and workers' rights to the four corners of the world, a cause of international appeal due to its universalism, the repercussions of Ferrer's death gave even more strength to local struggles. If the media phenomenon of which The Dreyfus Affair It was an exemplary case, the echoes of the shooting of Francesc Ferrer were not far behind.
Public figures rose up for or against a motto that soon proved to be transnational, far surpassing man and elevating it to the status of universal heritage. In Brazil, it found in the pen of one of the most important names in the history of Brazilian anarchism, Edgard Leuenroth, the mediator it needed so that its history would not only become known, but would also gain the air of a platform against an authoritarianism that knew no boundaries, a project of rational, scientific and anticlerical education embodied in the foundation of several initiatives inspired by its model.
Therefore, it is not an exaggeration to trust the hypothesis that the author so well articulates that the campaign promoted by Lantern is at the basis of the emergence of Modern Schools no 1 eno 2 in São Paulo or the Modern School of Petrópolis, both from 1913, in a land so far away and with a history so distinct from Spain. During the second decade of the XNUMXth century, therefore after the death of Francesc Ferrer and his elevation to myth, this mythification was carried out in Brazil by Lantern, modern schools would follow on from the already existing anarchist schools such as the Germinal Libertarian School (1903, São Paulo), the Popular University of Free Education of Elysio de Carvalho (1904, Rio de Janeiro), the Elisée Reclus School (1906, Porto Alegre), the Night School of the Workers' Federation (1907, Santos), not to mention the numerous Social Culture Centers and Popular Libraries spread throughout the country.
Ana Paula's research is, therefore, more than an analysis of the pages of a libertarian newspaper. It is an investigation driven by our indignation against an uncritical, dogmatic education, centered on repression and submission, sometimes unscientific and always alienating. It is a study that sheds light on the real possibility of rising up against mediocrity in favor of a critical education, especially an education that stimulates the full realization of the human being in search of making him capable not only of projecting himself as an individual, but as a social being.
This proposal sounded so subversive and intimidating that not only was Francesc Ferrer targeted, but we continue to be targeted, day after day, for defending an emancipatory pedagogy. The fight is not only against the obscurantism of anti-scientific or even denialist education, which is already quite a lot, but also against everything that limits creative development aimed at happiness, that tries to impose humiliating discipline on students, who from this perspective should be nothing more than an army of docile, depressed labor focused on mechanical production.
Francesc Ferrer's motto lives on, which is why it touches us so much. A remarkable fact was the countless monuments erected in his honor. When Sagristá made that incredible illustration, reproduced with or without color all over the world, a bust of Francesc Ferrer did not exist! It was there, on the printed paper of a cheap newspaper, that a monument to Ferrer was first erected, and then many others appeared around the world, such as the one erected by the Italian Ivo Paccini on September 14, 1914 in Roccatederighi, a small town in the Tuscany region.
Target of fascist rage, it was removed and hidden for 20 years to be reopened exactly 34 years later, on September 14, 1948, bearing the inscription: “Francisco Ferrer – 14-9-1914 – this monument abbattuto dai fascisti in 1924 riser pervolontà del popolo 1948” (Francisco Ferrer – 14-9-1914 – this monument demolished by the fascists in 1924 was resurrected by the will of the people in 1948). And it was from there, from the pages of newspapers, that this imaginary was erected as a monument, by the pen and chisel of those who saw in the blood spilled by Francesc Ferrer the myth that Ana Paula comes to decipher.
*Valéria dos Santos Guimaraes is a history professor at Unesp. Author of, among other books, Miscellaneous news: suicides for love, contagious readings and popular culture in São Paulo in the 1910s (Letter Market).
Reference
Ana Paula Neves Oliveira. Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia. A myth in dispute in the anticlerical pages of “The Lantern”. New York, 2024. [https://shre.ink/g1Fs]
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