ABSTRACT
Activists found that constitutional guarantees could quickly be suspended, and within a short period anarchists considered that their insistence on the totalitarian essence of even democratic states had been vindicated. One episode that both encapsulated and accelerated this dynamic was the uprising of Alt Llobregat in 1932. At the outset of the Republic, the population of the mining valley of Alt Llobregat in northern Cataluna lived in extreme poverty in labour colonies. Although anarchism as both an ideology and a branch of the workers' movement is impossible to define narrowly, hostility to the state has been taken to be a common principle. It has been suggested that the impetus for the reunification of the libertarian movement at the Zaragoza Congress of May 1936 came from the relative organisational paralysis brought about by repression and disunity. The fact that anarchists shared ideas relating to rational education with liberal republicans, and attended talks and debates at the larger ateneos frequented by republicans.
