Jose Buenaventura Durruti Dumange was a Spanish insurrectionary, anarcho-syndicalist militant involved with the CNT and FAI in the periods before and during the Spanish Civil War.
22 Facts About Buenaventura Durruti
2.
Jose Buenaventura was born in Leon, Spain, son of Anastasia Dumange and Santiago Durruti, as the second of eight children.
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Buenaventura Durruti started primary school when he was five and moved to the Calle Misericordia school four years later.
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In 1910, aged 14, Buenaventura Durruti left school to become a trainee mechanic in the railway yard in Leon.
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Buenaventura Durruti started his first job at Matallana de Torio when he was 18.
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Buenaventura Durruti took an active part in the strike of August 1917 called by the UGT when the government overturned an agreement between the union and the employers.
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Buenaventura Durruti managed to escape, but had to flee abroad to France where he came into contact with exiled anarchists.
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Buenaventura Durruti then decided to return to Spain and arrived at San Sebastian, Basque Country, just across the border.
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Shortly after Buenasca, the then president of the recently formed anarchist controlled Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo, persuaded Buenaventura Durruti to go to Barcelona to organise the workers there where the anarchist movement, as well as the syndicalists, was being brutally suppressed and most of its members jailed or executed.
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The influence Buenaventura Durruti's group gained inside the CNT caused a split, with a reformist faction under Angel Pestana leaving in 1931 and subsequently forming the Syndicalist Party.
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Less than a week later, on 24 July 1936 Buenaventura Durruti led over 3,000 armed anarchists from Barcelona to Zaragoza.
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Antony Beevor in The Spanish Civil War maintains that Buenaventura Durruti was killed when a companion's machine pistol went off by mistake.
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Buenaventura Durruti 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".
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Buenaventura 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.
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On 14 July 1927, Buenaventura Durruti met French anarcho-syndicalist, writer and shorthand typist Emilienne Morin at the Librairie internationale anarchiste in Paris.
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The couple travelled to Spain in 1931 and on 4 December 1931, their daughter Colette Buenaventura Durruti was born in Barcelona.
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Buenaventura Durruti 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.
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At first, Buenaventura Durruti's death was not made public, for morale reasons.
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Buenaventura Durruti's body was transported across the country to Barcelona for his funeral.
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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 Buenaventura Durruti Group was founded, to try and save the anarchist principles of the revolution.
21.
The name of Buenaventura Durruti clearly taken because of the revolutionary commitment and the symbol that he still was for that in the anarchist camp.
22.
The Friends of Buenaventura Durruti group had a newspaper called El Amigo del Pueblo and tried to make revolutionary propaganda among the rank and file of the CNT.