55 Facts About Francisco Ferrer

Francisco Ferrer's execution, following a revolt in Barcelona, propelled Ferrer into martyrdom and grew an international movement of radicals and libertarians, who established schools in his model and promoted his schooling approach.

At the turn of the century, Francisco Ferrer had resolved to open a libertarian school modeled on Paul Robin's Prevost orphanage school.

Francisco Ferrer's pedagogy borrowed from a tradition of 18th century rationalism and 19th century romanticism.

Francisco Ferrer held that children should wield freewheeling liberties at the expense of conformity, regulation, and discipline.

Francisco Ferrer's school eschewed punishments, rewards, and exams, and encouraged practical experience over academic study.

The rapidity of Francisco Ferrer's rise troubled Spanish church and state authorities, who viewed the school as a front for insurrectionary activity.

Francisco Ferrer was held in association with the 1906 assassination attempt on the Spanish King, which was used as a pretext for closing the school, but was ultimately released without conviction under international pressure a year later.

Francisco Ferrer traveled Europe as an advocate of the Spanish revolutionary cause, founded a libertarian education advocacy organization, and reopened his press.

In mid-1909, Francisco Ferrer was arrested and accused of orchestrating a week of insurrection known as Barcelona's Tragic Week.

Francisco Ferrer was prominently memorialized in writing, monuments, and demonstrations across three continents.

Francesc Francisco Ferrer i Guardia was born January 10 or 14,1859, on a farm near Barcelona in Alella, Spain.

Francisco Ferrer became a republican and freethinker in his youth.

Francisco Ferrer used his position as a train conductor on a route between France and Barcelona to transmit messages for the exiled Republican leader Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla and shepherd republicans, radicals and freemasons to sanctuary.

In Paris, Francisco Ferrer taught Spanish, sold wine on commission, volunteered as Ruiz's secretary, and pursued radical efforts.

Francisco Ferrer was a Dreyfusard, a delegate to the London 1896 Congress of the Second International, and a teacher at the Masonic school.

Francisco Ferrer met Louise Michel, Elisee Reclus, Sebastien Faure, befriended Charles Malato and Jean Grave, and bonded with Spanish anarchists Anselmo Lorenzo and Fernando Tarrida del Marmol.

Many major and minor anarchist figures from Barcelona worked in affiliation with the school Francisco Ferrer later opened, and Europe's most prominent anarchist leaders advised and wrote for him.

Francisco Ferrer was captivated by Paul Robin's Prevost orphanage school in Cempuis, which modeled the school Francisco Ferrer would open.

Francisco Ferrer believed that social and economic environment played a larger role in a child's development than heredity, and so his school aimed to provide nature, exercise, love, and understanding, especially towards children normally subject to stigma.

Around 1900, Francisco Ferrer declared his intention to open a similar libertarian school, which became plausible when he inherited around a million francs from a middle-aged French woman whom he had tutored in Spanish and convinced of his ideas.

Francisco Ferrer followed in a rough and ready Spanish tradition of extragovernment, rationalist education: the republicans and Fourierists schools, the anarchist and secularist schools, Paul Robin's Cempuis orphanage, Joan Puig i Elias, and Jose Sanchez Rosa.

Free education, to Francisco Ferrer, entailed educators who would use improvised experimentation to arouse the child's will and autodidactic drive rather than impose their own dogmatic ideas through formal curriculum.

Francisco Ferrer's pedagogy sought to strip dogma from education and instead help children direct their own powers.

Francisco Ferrer's school eschewed punishments and rewards, which he felt incentivized deception over sincerity.

Francisco Ferrer prioritized practical knowledge over theory and encouraged children to experience rather than read.

The Escuela Moderna additionally hosted a school to train teachers and a radical publishing press, which translated and created more than 40 textbooks adequate for Francisco Ferrer's purposes, written in accessible language on recent scientific concepts.

The school was an embryonic version of the future libertarian society Francisco Ferrer hoped to see.

Propaganda and agitation were central to the Escuela Moderna's aims, as Francisco Ferrer dreamt of a society in which people constantly renewed themselves and their environment through experimentation.

Francisco Ferrer believed that respect for fellow men was a quality to be instilled in children, as children brought to love freedom and see their dignity as shared with others would become good adults.

Francisco Ferrer advocated for a Spanish popular university that never came to fruition.

Francisco Ferrer was the center of Barcelonian libertarian education for the decade between his return and his death.

The rapidity of Francisco Ferrer's rise in influence troubled Spanish authorities.

Francisco Ferrer published La Huelga General, a syndicalist journal, between 1901 and 1903, and worked to organize the Catalonian revolutionary labor movement and promote direct action.

Francisco Ferrer led a parade of 1,700 children for secular education on Good Friday in April 1906.

Francisco Ferrer was intimidated and vilified for his work in Barcelona.

Francisco Ferrer was subject to slanderous public rumors to tarnish his reputation, including intonations of gambling, financial speculation, and hedonism.

Francisco Ferrer was held in association with the 1906 assassination attempt on Spanish King Alfonso XIII, but ultimately released under international pressure the next year.

Francisco Ferrer was arrested in June 1906 on charges of planning the attempt and persuading Morral to perform it.

Francisco Ferrer was a militant anarchist, contrary to his proclamations otherwise, who believed in direct action and the usefulness of violence.

The Oxford historian Joaquin Romero Maura credits Francisco Ferrer with coordinating the Morral assassination attempt and a similar attempt a year earlier.

Francisco Ferrer was released from prison in June 1907, backed by an international coalition of anarchist and rationalist organizations who presented Francisco Ferrer's case as another iniquitous Spanish inquisition.

The next month, Francisco Ferrer toured the European capitals as an advocate of the Spanish revolutionary cause.

Francisco Ferrer additionally helped the creation of the syndicalist labor federation Solidaridad Obrera and its journal.

Francisco Ferrer was arrested at the end of August 1909 following the previous month's civil unrest and week of outright insurrection in Barcelona known as Tragic Week.

Francisco Ferrer was charged with orchestrating the rebellion and became its most famous casualty.

Francisco Ferrer likely participated in the week's events, though historian of anarchism Paul Avrich considered Francisco Ferrer's role marginal.

Francisco Ferrer maintained his innocence and was barred from presenting complementary testimony.

Francisco Ferrer's execution became known as "martyrdom" to the causes of free thought and rational education.

Francisco Ferrer was widely believed to be innocent at the time of his death.

Francisco Ferrer's death was covered widely, from the front page of The New York Times to a number of books.

Francisco Ferrer's works were translated into multiple languages as a rationalist education movement spread worldwide.

Francisco Ferrer's methods were invoked by Gustav Landauer and Nestor Makhno.

The international fallout from Francisco Ferrer's execution led to the demise of the Antonio Maura administration.

Francisco Ferrer separated from his wife, Teresa Sanmarti, and later had relations with a friend of the woman whose inheritance funded the Barcelona school.

Francisco Ferrer then fell in love with a teacher at his Escuela Moderna, Soledad Villafranca.