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Eric Hobsbawm is a man of the Enlightenment: does he not define socialism
as the last and most extreme heir of the eighteenth century's rationalism?(FN1)
So it is not surprising that the distinction between 'modern and 'primitive
or 'archaic has an important place in his work.(FN2) However, examining
some of his writings, and in particular the three books from the period
1959-69 devoted to so-called archaic forms of revolt, it is evident
that his approach differs markedly from the 'progressive orthodoxy in
its interest, sympathy, even fascination -- these are his own words
-- for 'primitive movements of peasant anti-modern (anti-capitalist)
resistance and protest. I refer to Primitive Rebels (1959), Bandits
(1969) and Captain Swing (1969).(FN3).
This attitude -- at one and the same time methodological, ethical and
political -- implies a distancing in relation to a certain type of historiography
that tends -- because of what he criticizes as a rationalist and 'modernist
bias -- to ignore these movements, seeing them as strange vestiges or
marginal phenomena. But Hobsbawm insisted that these 'primitive , and
in particular rural, populations were still today -- that is, in the
1950s -- the overwhelming majority of the nation in most of the countries
in the world. Furthermore, and this is the decisive argument for this
historian, 'their acquisition of political consciousness has made our
century the most revolutionary in history .(FN4) In other words, far
from being marginal, this kind of movement is the source or root of
the great revolutionary upheavals of the twentieth century, in which
peasants and the mass of the rural poor have played a crucial part:
the Mexican Revolution of 1911-19, the 1917 Russian Revolution, the
1936 Spanish Revolution, the Chinese and Cuban Revolutions. This idea
is merely suggested by Hobsbawm, who does not deal directly with any
of these events, but it forms a sort of backdrop to his research on
the 'primitives .(FN5).
In the remarks that follow I shall attempt to systematize a line of
thought that is rather fragmentary and dispersed through the studies
of concrete cases that make up the historian's work.
Hobsbawm says that, in order to understand these revolts, you have to
start from the realization that modernization, the intrusion of capitalism
into traditional peasant societies and the advent of economic liberalism
and modern social relationships, is truly catastrophic for them, a genuine
social cataclysm that leaves them completely out of joint. Whether the
arrival of the modern capitalist world is a gradual process, through
the working of economic forces the peasants do not understand, or a
sudden one, brought about by conquest or a change of regime, they perceive
it as an aggressive act that destroys their way of life. Mass peasant
revolts against this new order, which is experienced as unbearably unjust,
are often inspired by nostalgia for the traditional world, the 'good
old days -- that belong more or less to the realm of myth -- and take
on the appearance of a kind of 'political Luddism .(FN6).
For instance, epidemics of social banditry are largely the reaction
of peasant communities to the destruction of their way of life by the
modern world. As for the rise of rural anarchism in nineteenth-century
Andalusia -- one of the most impressive movements of 'revolutionary
millenarianism (to which we shall return) -- it should be understood
as the peasants' reaction to the introduction of capitalist social and
legal relations into their region.(FN7) But the example of rural anti-capitalist
resistance that Hobsbawm has studied most systematically is the 1830
English agricultural workers' revolt, a mass movement of protest which
used 'archaic methods -- setting fire to haylofts, destroying machines
-- under the name of the mythical 'Captain Swing . In the book he devoted
(with his friend Georges Rudé) to this rebellion, which was cruelly
put down by the authorities -- 19 executed, 481 deported to Australia,
and 644 condemned to long prison sentences for a revolt that destroyed
property but did not end in the death of any of its enemies -- he describes
the movement as an improvised, spontaneous, 'archaic resistance to the
logic of the market, the total triumph of rural capitalism. It is no
accident that the most advanced areas of the country, as far as the
mechanization of production and the development of commercial agriculture
were concerned -- such as East Anglia -- should have been the revolt's
main epicentres.(FN8).
Hobsbawm writes that it is hard to find words to describe the deterioration
in the working conditions of English rural labourers as a consequence
of the advent, during the period 1750-1850, of the industrial society.
One by one, 'with the inevitability of tragic drama , the agricultural
worker's defences against poverty's traditional ills -- sickness, old
age, unemployment -- were wrenched away from him and he lost the few
traditional rights and the little security he still had. Because of
new initiatives introduced from 1795 onwards -- the notorious 'Speenhamland
system -- wages gradually fell, only to be replaced by the appalling
'charity of the Poor Laws, with their humiliating, degrading, repugnant
rules. Agricultural labourers found themselves trapped in a tougher,
less egalitarian, more inhumane economic and working environment than
in the past. It was thus a bilious accumulation of fury, hate, resentment
and despair that provoked the labour explosion of 1830.(FN9).
In this context it is understandable that 'Captain Swing's revolt was
largely inspired by nostalgia for the past, defence of the customary
rights of the rural poor and the wish to restore the traditional order
that had guaranteed them; in this sense, Hobsbawm says, the movement
was a kind of 'a general manifesto of past against future .(FN10).
However, refusing to follow a certain 'modernist tradition -- one that
is liberal as well as left-leaning -- the historian does not by any
means describe this movement as 'reactionary . Rather than criticizing
it for a 'yearning for the past , he attributes its failure to the fact
that it did not manage to spread into the urban areas: 'Perhaps "Swing's"
greatest tragedy was that it never succeeded in linking up with the
rebellion of mine, mill and city. (FN11) Even the act by which the revolt
directly challenged technological progress, the destruction of threshing
machines -- the type of practice despised by historians who are trapped
in the fetishism of 'the means of production -- he finds socially and
humanly understandable. Those machines, which took away from agricultural
workers their main occupation during the long and difficult winter months,
by condemning them to unemployment and starvation, seemed to them 'an
unmitigated tragedy and the very symbol of their poverty. Which explains
the universal hostility, the general hatred for this mechanical tool,
which was widely destroyed with hammers and iron bars by the 'Swings
. Instead of condemning these acts as 'archaic or 'irrational , Hobsbawm
-- who acknowledges that 'the historian of this uprising was fascinated,
touched and moved by his subject -- sees the threshing machines' destruction
and their partial neutralization for several decades as the most successful
consequence of the revolt! Noting the superiority in this regard of
'Captain Swing compared with 'King Ludd , he concludes his historical
survey of the 1830 events with these words: 'The threshing machines
did not return on the old scale. Of all the machine-breaking movements
of the 19th century that of the helpless and unorganized farm-labourers
proved to be by far the most effective. (FN12).
What is true of the 'Swings can also be applied to other movements of
'political Luddism or traditionalist revolt against 'what the outside
world ... considers "progress" , such as the peasant uprisings
in Russia or southern Italy in the name of the Tsar or the Bourbons.(FN13).
Do these movements challenge the established order? Here we come to
one of the main questions exercising Eric Hobsbawm: in what conditions
and forms can 'primitive revolt transmute into revolution?
As far as social banditry is concerned, the transformation is difficult.
Movements in favour of national independence are more easily understood
in terms of the archaic political culture of the social bandits than
are modern revolutionary movements, which are not simply directed against
a foreign power. However, it may be that the two worlds overlap, as
happened in the case of the 1911-19 Mexican Revolution: 'The great Pancho
Villa was recruited by Madero's men in the Mexican Revolution and became
a formidable general of the revolutionary armies. Perhaps of all professional
bandits in the Western world, he was the one with the most distinguished
revolutionary career. (FN14).
Of all the forms of 'primitive revolt, the millenarian movements seem
to the historian the most likely to become revolutionary. One could
say there is a sort of 'elective affinity -- this is my terminology
and not Eric Hobsbawm's(FN15) -- a structural analogy between millenarianism
and revolution: 'The essence of millenarianism, the hope of a complete
and radical change in the world which will be reflected in the millenium,
a world shorn of all its present deficiencies, is not confined to primitivism.
It is present, almost by definition, in all revolutionary movements
of whatever kind, and 'millenarian elements may therefore be discovered
by the student in any of them, insofar as they have ideals. And he adds
that archaic millenarian movements in Europe have three characteristic
features:.
(1) a revolutionary aspect, for instance deep and total rejection of
the existing evil world and a passionate aspiration to another, better
one;.
(2) a 'chiliastic type of ideology, usually of messianic Judeo-Christian
origin;.
(3) a fundamental vagueness as to the means of bringing about the new
society.(FN16).
Thanks to the problematic of millenarianism, Eric Hobsbawm's historiography
incorporates all the richness of socio-cultural subjectivity -- the
depth of beliefs, feelings and emotions -- into his analysis of historical
events, which, from this viewpoint, are no longer perceived simply as
products of the 'objective interplay of economic or political forces.
This openness to the subjective dimension means that analysis in terms
of social classes does not preclude the irreducible part played by individuals
-- both famous and anonymous -- whom the historian often allows to speak.
Although he makes a careful distinction between primitive millenarianisms
and modern revolutionisms, Hobsbawm nevertheless emphasizes their elective
relationship (or affinity): 'Even the least millenarian modern revolutionaries
have in them a streak of "impossibilism" which makes them
cousins to the Taborites and Anabaptists, a kinship which they have
never denied. (FN17).
This does not mean that 'all revolutionary movements are millenarian
in the strict sense or -- which is even worse -- that they are connected
to a primitive type of chiliasm.(FN18) And vice versa, not every millenarian
movement is necessarily revolutionary, like for example the messianic
uprising around the Joachimite prophet Davide Lazzaretti in Tuscany
in the 1870s, studied by Hobsbawm in Primitive Rebels.(FN19).
All the same, the affinity between them is a basic fact in the history
of peasant revolts against capitalist modernization. It seems to me
that this is one of the most interesting research hypotheses outlined
by Hobsbawm in his work of that period. He illustrated his idea in two
utterly enthralling case studies: rural anarchism in Andalusia and the
Sicilian peasant leagues, both arising at the end of the nineteenth
century and continuing into the twentieth.
Spanish agrarian anarchism is perhaps 'the most impressive example of
a modern mass millenarian or quasi-millenarian movement . With its simple
revolutionism, its total and absolute rejection of this perverse and
oppressive world, its absolute faith in the 'great change , the advent
of a world of Justice and Liberty, this libertarian communist movement
-- which in an uncanny way chimed with the feelings and spontaneous
aspirations of the Andalusian peasantry and their refusal of the new
capitalist order -- was 'utopian, millenarian, apocalyptic .(FN20).
Hobsbawm's attitude to the Andalusian anarchists is thoroughly ambivalent.
On the one hand, he does not conceal his admiration for their social
energy, their passionate fervour, their belief in education, science
and progress, their hunger for knowledge -- even when riding a donkey,
the militant was still reading, leaving the reins loose on the animal's
neck! -- their simple but grandiose ideal of a just and free society,
their internationalist spirit of solidarity, which 'made the village
cobbler in a small Andalusian town conscious of having brothers fighting
the same fight in Madrid and New York, in Barcelona and Leghorn, in
Buenos Aires . Even their 'messianic uprisings every ten years or so,
always doomed to failure because of their isolation, were maybe 'under
the circumstances ... the least hopeless among available revolutionary
techniques . In short, Andalusian anarchism is a phenomenon that cannot
fail to be 'intensely moving for anyone who cares for the fate of man
.(FN21).
Nevertheless, Hobsbawm considers -- and here it is obviously the English
communist speaking -- that because of a lack of organization, strategy,
tactics and patience, the Anarchists 'wasted their revolutionary energies
almost completely . This brusque verdict is partly belied by the recognition,
a few paragraphs earlier, of the fact that, when the conditions were
right, as they were in July 1936, anarchist villages were fully able
to carry through 'a classical revolution -- 'taking power from the local
officials, policemen and landlords .(FN22) The proof of their ineffectiveness
and their incorrigibly pre-modern nature, according to Hobsbawm, is
that 'in defeat anarchism was and is helpless . In Andalusia only the
communists were able to organize an illegal movement and pockets of
armed resistance after the civil war or around 1944-46.(FN23).
This somewhat one-sided verdict is challenged by the existence of groups
of anarchist guerrillas, especially in Catalonia; for instance there
was one -- in an urban context, admittedly, not a rural one as was the
case in Andalusia -- directed by the militant libertarian Francisco
Sabaté Llopart, known as 'Quico , a veteran of the 26th Durruti
Division, who led spectacular clandestine actions in Barcelona from
1945 to 1960: 'expropriation of banks, attacks on the police, etc.(FN24)
In this case study of a revolutionary Catalan 'expropriator , Hobsbawm
passes a further brief judgment on the anarchist movement. Preserving
a critical distance, he nevertheless expresses a deep respect that is
rarely matched in the work of a communist historian: the Catalan libertarian
militants, he writes,.
The 'idea of anarchism was their motive: that totally uncompromising
and lunatic dream which a great many of us share, but which few except
Spaniards have ever tried to act upon, at the cost of total defeat and
impotence for their labour movement. Theirs was the world in which men
were governed by pure morality as dictated by conscience; where there
is no poverty, no government, no jails, no policemen, no compulsion
and discipline except that of the inner light; no social bond except
fraternity and love; no lies; no property; no bureaucracy.(FN25).
Should we see in this surprising homage the influence on the historian
of the spirit of May '68 (the book was published in 1969)?
The other millenarian revolutionary movement studied by Hobsbawm is
the Sicilian peasant leagues. He finds it a prime example, in that it
is a 'primitive agrarian movement that becomes 'modern by aligning itself
with socialism and communism. As happened in Andalusia, which is strikingly
similar to Sicily, the peasants revolted at the end of the nineteenth
century against the introduction of capitalist relationships into the
rural environment -- with consequences that were aggravated by the world
depression in agriculture of the 1880s. The movement arose with the
foundation and growth of the peasant leagues, usually under socialist
leadership, followed by riots and strikes on a scale that scared the
Italian government, causing it to make use of troops to stamp out the
threat.(FN26).
This movement was 'primitive and millenarian to the extent that the
socialism preached by the leagues was seen by the Sicilian peasants
as a new religion, the true religion of Christ -- betrayed by the priests,
who were on the side of the rich -- that foretold the advent of a new
world, without poverty, hunger and cold, in accordance with God's will.
Crosses and images of saints were carried when they demonstrated and
the movement, which included many women, spread like an epidemic during
1891-94: the peasant masses were urged on by the messianic belief that
the start of a new reign of justice was imminent. At the same time,
as innumerable accounts reveal -- for instance impressive statements
from a peasant woman from the village of Piana dei Greci (published
among the documents in the book's appendix) -- 'there is no doubt at
all that revolution was what the peasants hoped for, a new and just,
equal and communist society .(FN27).
Despite the 1894 defeat, permanent peasant movements were set up in
certain areas of Sicily, thanks to the socialists' modern organizational
methods, and after the Great War the communist movement built on these.
The story of the village of Piana dei Greci is illustrative of this
continuity: epicentre of the late nineteenth-century revolts, it was
a communist stronghold still in the 1950s: 'their original millenarian
enthusiasm has been transmuted into something more durable: permanent
and organized allegiance to a modern social-revolutionary movement.
As far as Hobsbawm is concerned, this development is not simply a substitution
of the 'modern for the 'archaic , but a kind of 'dialectical integration
-- in the sense of the Hegelian-Marxist Aufhebung -- of the former into
the latter: Piana's experience 'shows that millenarianism need not be
a temporary phenomenon but can, under favourable conditions, be the
foundation of a permanent and exceedingly tough and resistant form of
movement .(FN28).
In other words, millenarianism should not be seen only as 'a touching
survival from an archaic past , but as a cultural force that is still
active, in another guise, in modern social and political movements.
The conclusion he offers at the end of his chapter devoted to the Sicilian
leagues has a clear historical, social and political resonance that
is wider and more universal: 'when harnessed to a modern movement, millenarianism
can not only become politically effective, but it may do so without
the loss of that zeal, that burning confidence in a new world, and that
generosity of emotion which characterizes it even in its most primitive
and perverse forms. And no one can read the testimony of such people
as the anonymous peasant woman of Piana without hoping that their spirit
can be preserved .(FN29) This remark may be taken almost as the 'moral
of the story for the whole of his work on millenarianism and primitive
revolts.
I think that here Eric Hobsbawm has opened a fascinating avenue for
research that is worth pursuing, not only by historians but also by
political sociologists or anthropologists studying contemporary (late
twentieth-century) phenomena. I would quote just two examples from my
own research field, as a sociologist interested in Latin America: the
Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in Chiapas (Mexico) and the
Landless Peasant Movement (MST) in Brazil. Both are peasant movements
protesting against (and resisting) capitalist modernization, both contain
millenarian elements that are similar to the phenomena studied by Hobsbawm,
and both are fundamentally modern movements in their agenda, their demands,
their activities and their organizational forms.
The EZLN arose in the Chiapas mountains out of the fusion of the Guevarism
(which itself is not without its millenarian dimension) of a handful
of urban militants with the 'archaic revolt of native Maya communities
and the Christian messianism of the communities ecclesiastical base
(founded in the 1970s by the Bishop of Chiapas, Mgr Samuel Ruiz), all
under the supreme banner of the millenarian legend of Emiliano Zapata.
The result of this explosive political, cultural, social and religious
cocktail has been some of the most original peasant rebellions of the
1990s.
It is true that the January 1994 Zapatista uprising was directed against
the age-old oppression of the indigenous Mayas by the authorities and
landowners, but it was immediately motivated by the neo-liberal modernization
measures introduced by the federal government: privatization of the
rural communities (ejidos) created by the Mexican Revolution, and the
free-trade agreement with the United States (ALENA), which threatened
with collapse the traditional growing of maize by indigenous communities
-- the basis of their cultural identity over thousands of years -- by
opening Mexico up to GM maize from North American agro-businesses.
The Zapatista movement is also distinguished by a libertarian element,
which can be seen both in the self-management of the villages and in
its refusal to play the political game and even to accept the possibility
of 'taking over power . That is why anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist
movements, which are experiencing a certain revival, particularly in
southern Europe, have made solidarity with the Chiapas rebels one of
the main planks of their platform.
As for the Brazilian MST, which has its socio-cultural roots in the
Church's Land Pastoral, church communities and liberation theology,
it is also marked by an amazing mixture of popular religiosity, 'archaic
peasant revolt and modern organization, in a radical struggle for agrarian
reform and, eventually, for a 'classless society . This movement, which
has a high emotional and 'mystical component -- 'mystical is the term
the militants themselves use to describe participants' state of mind
-- or even 'millenarian (in the broad sense) -- the similarity to the
1890s Sicilian leagues is striking -- brings together hundreds of thousands
of peasants, tenant farmers and agricultural laborers and has now become
the biggest social movement in Brazil and the main force protesting
against the neo-liberal modernization policy of successive Brazilian
governments.
To judge by these examples, revolutionary millenarianism -- the most
radical form of peasant resistance against capitalist modernization
-- as Eric Hobsbawm studied it, is not necessarily a phenomenon of the
past.
Michael Löwy CNRS, Paris (translated from the French by Jean
Burrell).
Michael Löwy was born in Brazil but has lived in France since 1969.
A research director of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS),
he teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales (EHESS). He was awarded the CNRS silver medal in 1994 and is
the author of numerous works, translated into twenty-five languages,
including, Redemption and Utopia: Libertarian Judaism in Central Europe
(1990); Révolte et mélancolie: le romantisme à
cours-courant de la modernité (with Robert Sayre), (1992); and
The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (1998).
FOOTNOTES
1. E. Hobsbawm (1959), Primitive Rebels. Studies in Archaic Forms of
Social Movement in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries (New York,
Norton Library), p. 126.
2. I systematically put quotation marks round the words 'primitive or
'archaic -- which Hobsbawm does not always do -- to indicate a certain
critical distance with regard to terms that are useful but nevertheless
quite closely linked with an evolutionist or 'modernist view of history.
3. I shall not be dealing here with Hobsbawm's work on the peasantry
published during the 1970s and included in the admirable collection
Uncommon People (1998, New York, The New Press). Its problematic is
different and it does not refer (or very little) to the two aspects
that concern me in this article: resistance to capitalism and revolutionary
millenarianism.
4. Primitive Rebels, pp. 2, 3.
5. Sadly this notion is not taken up by Hobsbawm in his history of the
twentieth century: he demonstrates very pertinently how the process
of modernization led to the spectacular decline of the peasantry after
the Second World War, but he does not raise the question of peasant
resistance to this decline, nor does he study more systematically the
part played by 'primitive peasant groups in the century's great revolutionary
movements. Cf. E. Hobsbawm (1994), Age of Extremes. The short twentieth
century, 1914-1991 (London, Penguin), pp. 289-294.
6. Primitive Rebels, pp. 3, 67, 119.
7. E. Hobsbawm (2000), Bandits (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, first
published in 1969), p. 27 and Primitive Rebels, pp. 82-83.
8. E. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé (1969), Captain Swing (London, Weidenfeld
& Nicolson), pp. 15, 16, 19, 83. All the passages quoted, like those
that follow, refer to the chapters of the book written by Hobsbawm,
according to the division of labour with his co-author Rudé indicated
in the preface. It is clear that the England of the 1830s was at a much
more advanced level of modernization of agriculture and development
of rural capitalism than regions in the south of Europe, where social
banditry principally arose.
9. Primitive Rebels, pp. 46, 52, 75, 76. Hobsbawm's analysis owes much
to the book by Karl Polanyi (1945), The Great Transformation, which
he praises in a footnote of Captain Swing -- p. 54 -- as a 'brilliant
and unduly neglected book .
10. Swing, p. 16.
11. Ibid., p. 19.
12. Ibid., pp. 281, 298. Many years before his colleague E. P. Thompson,
Hobsbawm had defended the Luddites and other 'machine breakers against
attacks inspired by 'nineteenth-century middle class economic apologists
. See 'The Machine Breakers (1952), in Uncommon People, pp. 5-17.
13. Primitive Rebels, p. 119; Bandits, p. 31.
14. Bandits, p. 114. Curiously Hobsbawm seems to take no interest in
that other great Mexican revolutionary, Emiliano Zapata. His name does
not appear in Primitive Rebels. He mentioned him later, in the 1973
article on peasants and politics, but I feel he much underestimates
the scope of that millenarian, revolutionary peasant movement when he
writes that 'the political influence of Zapata's agrarian programme
derives from the fact that his peasant levies were close enough to occupy
the capital of Mexico . (E. Hobsbawm, 'Peasants and Politics , in Uncommon
People, p. 154.).
15. M. Löwy (1990), Redemption and Utopia. Libertarian Judaism
in Central Europe (London: Athlone).
16. Primitive Rebels, pp. 57-58. Other religions, to the extent that
they see the world as stable or cyclical, are less conducive to the
rise of millenarianism.
17. Ibid., p. 64. Where does Hobsbawm's interest in millenarianism,
in his work of the late 1950s, spring from? When I interviewed him on
20 March 1982, he suggested three possible explanations: 'Perhaps it's
because I belonged to a revolutionary movement. Then it was the moment
of the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and
we felt we needed to sum up, ask some basic questions. And finally I
was influenced by anthropologists who had worked on that topic, in particular
Max Glucksmann and his followers, such as Peter Worsley, who was a fellow-comrade
in the party at the time. .
18. Hobsbawm dissociates himself here from Norman Cohn's work -- The
Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) -- which he accuses, not without reason,
of blurring the difference between the two.
19. Primitive Rebels, pp. 68-73.
20. Ibid., pp. 83-90.
21. Ibid., pp. 82-90, 107.
22. Ibid., pp. 90-91. Strangely, Hobsbawm does not mention the experience
of the libertarian agrarian communities in 1936-7. In other writings
from the 1966-69, Hobsbawm dealt with anarchism, expressing his admiration
but above all reservations and criticisms. Though he was convinced of
the 'ineffectiveness of anarchist methods, he nevertheless rejected
Stalin's attacks on libertarian ideas during the 1930s, in the context
of the Spanish conflicts, putting them down to 'the attempt to give
a theoretical legitimation to the Stalinist development of a dictatorial
and terrorist state ('Bolshevism and the Anarchists , 1969, in Revolutionaries
(New York, Meridian Books, 1975) p. 70).
23. Primitive Rebels, pp. 91-92.
24. The story of this group and its main leader is told in detail by
Hobsbawm in his book Bandits. Though critical of his lack of realism,
the author is literally fascinated by 'Quico Sabaté, that 'public
legend , that 'tragic hero , who died in 1960 in a final battle with
Franco's police. He devotes no less than 15 pages to him -- in a slim
volume of only 145 in the French edition. Curiously enough, the chapter
has almost no footnotes: it is clear that Hobsbawm unearthed his character's
biography by means of detailed primary research among 'Quico's old comrades
and friends in exile in France. For Hobsbawm, who virtually rescued
him from oblivion, 'it is just that he Francisco Sabaté should
be so remebered, in the company of other heroes . See Bandits, p. 138.
25. Bandits, p. 114.
26. Primitive Rebels, pp. 96-97. These peasant organizations were also
called 'fasci , but in order to avoid unfortunate confusion I prefer
to use the term 'leagues , which figures in Hobsbawm's book.
27. Ibid., pp. 98-101.
28. Ibid., pp. 101-105.
29. Ibid., pp. 106-107.
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