Spanish Republicanism and the Press

This chapter examines the important role of freethinking and federal republican publications on the formation of anarchist ideology and social practices. It focuses on the distribution and circulation of Spanish freethinking newspapers in Spanish-speaking progressive and anarchist communities in the United States, presenting a new line of inquiry into Hispanic anarchism and its transnational networks. The freethinking movement that crystalized at the end of the nineteenth century constitutes an excellent example of this confluence of ideas. This movement garnered the sympathies of many republicans, socialists, anarchists, masons, and other dissidents who shared the heterodox theses of its main mouthpiece, the weekly journal Las Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento (The Sunday Supplement of Free Thought). Edited between 1883 and 1909 in Madrid, this paper was well known across Spain.