In Europe

central role. The philosophy of Mikhail Bakunin, like that of Tolstoy, harkened back to the ideal of the
mir
, the free, autonomous Russian village community. Bakunin's body of thought found adherents everywhere in the countryside of Southern Europe, but in Spain ‘the Idea’ was generally embraced as anew religion. In both city and countryside, the anarchists were far and away the most important revolutionary movement.
    By 1873 there were some 50,000 followers of Bakunin in Spain. Anarchist teachers and students made the rounds of the villages, the way mendicant monks had for centuries before them, organising night schools and teaching farmers to read. By 1918 more than 200 anarchist newspapers and periodicals were being published in Spain. The anarchist union CNT had more than 700,000 members; the socialist UGT at that point had no more than 200,000.
    Anarchism could become so popular because it was, in essence, a nostalgic rural movement. It appealed to a kind of homesickness that was felt as strongly by the farmers as it was by the workers of Barcelona, Bilbao and Madrid; most of them, after all, were the children or grandchildren of farmers. Landlordism was theft. Land and factories belonged to their workers. A fair exchange of goods and services had to be achieved. Just as in Italy, the central state was alien and hostile. In its stead, a system of communities – of villages, neighbourhoods and factories that ran themselves and made mutual agreements on a voluntary basis – was to be established. (The urban anarchists later developed a more complex model of ‘syndicates’, while the rural anarchists stuck to the original village model.) A general uprising was all that was needed, in Bakunin's words, to unshackle the ‘spontaneous creativity of the masses’.
    It seemed like a paradisal dream: the definitive answer to the rigid centralism of Madrid, the corruption of the church and the government, the oppression of the nobility and landlords. But at the same time it was a movement whose ideal lay in the past, in the days before the modernisation of Europe, in the medieval urban and village communities. ‘Those who would have been bandits in the 1840s became anarchists in the 1880s,’ writes the historian Hugh Thomas. ‘Anarchism was thus more a protest against industrialisation than a method of organising it to the public advantage.’
    Sometimes I think: the left lost the civil war more than the right ever won it.
    When I wake up in Barcelona, it is Sunday. My van is parked on a camping ground in a no-man's-land near the city, a place where billboards are the only thing sprouting from the soil. Hundreds of tents and mobile homesstand glistening in the sun, right in the path of the local landing patterns. Every five minutes a shiny Boeing belly comes roaring over us.
    It is already hot outside.
Das rollende Hotel
, a bus containing three dozen Germans who all sleep in an enormous trailer, piled up in little berths like sausage rolls in a vending machine, has settled down in front of me. They are on a three-week tour of Spain and Portugal. ‘It's not that bad,’ an older man tells me. ‘It's sort of like a ship's cabin.’ Some of the tourists hardly leave the bus at all, they stare mutely out of the window at what the new day will bring.
    Late that afternoon I wander down Las Ramblas, the city's grand promenade and marketplace. There are flowers and fighting cocks for sale, along the street are beggars with stumps bared and little dogs on leads, there are ventriloquists and dancing Gypsies, and through it all shuffles and drums the procession of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
    A South American music group is playing in the Plaça de Catalunya. A retired couple is tripping the light fantastic; he has liver spots on his bald pate, her hair looks like lambswool, together they run through all the steps and pirouettes of half a century ago, right there in the middle of the street, and all time is forgotten.
    On the quiet morning of 19 July, 1936, a young man came bicycling down Las Ramblas, his wispy red hair flopping, shouting again and again: ‘The soldiers are at University Square!’ Everyone began running. ‘It was as if the lad had an enormous broom on the front of his bicycle which swept the people out of Las Ramblas towards the university,’ an eyewitness said later. That was the start of the popular left-wing resistance to General Franco, who had set his military revolt in motion that