Antonio Téllez Solà, who has died at his home in Perpignan aged 84, was
one of the last survivors of the anarchist resistance which fought to
overthrow the Franco dictatorship. He was also one of the first historians
of the post civil war urban and rural guerrilla resistance to the fascist
regime. In his actions and his writings, Tellez personified refusal to
surrender to tyranny.
The son of a railway worker, he was born in Tarragona and was radicalised
by the October 1934 insurrection in Asturias, which failed when the unions
outside the mining region failed to give their support. On 19 July 1936,
when the workers, this time united, held at bay the rebellion of most of
the Spanish officer class against the infant left-wing Republic, Téllez
was in Lérida where he joined the anarchist youth organisation, the
Juventudes Libertarias, immersing himself in the struggle to fight fascism
and preserve the social revolution with which the union rank and file had
answered the generals’ attempted coup.
Téllez joined the army aged 18, in the final stages of the Republic’s
collapse, and saw action on various fronts until February 1939 when, with
thousands of other anti-Francoist refugees, he was forced into exile in
France. There he spent a year in the Septfonds concentration camp and then
a further six months in the camp at Argeles sur Mer, two of many locations
in which the French government interned the people who had held fascism at
bay for almost three years. Escaping at the end of 1940, he joined a band
of Spanish guerrillas operating in the Aveyron department, serving as part
of the IX Brigade (French Forces of the Interior), resisting the
occupation until Liberation in 1944.
In October 1944 Téllez took part in the ill-advised 10-day invasion of
Francoist Spain by approximately 6,000 Spanish republican guerrillas of
the CP-led Unión Nacional Española (UNE) via the Arán and Ronçal valleys
in the Pyrenees, one of the first operations mounted by the maquis against
the Franco regime. With the defeat of the UNE at the battle of Salardú, he
moved to Toulouse where he set up clandestine arms dumps for the guerrilla
campaign.
For two years Téllez served on the second peninsular committee of the
Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL), carrying out clandestine
liaison missions between the anarchist movement in France and Spain.
Resigning from organisational activity in April 1946, he travelled
undercover in Spain for three months establishing contacts with the
guerrillas and what remained of the illegal anarchist movement. Téllez
was unable to generate financial or organisational support for the
Resistance due to the hostility of the Toulouse-based National Committee
of the exiled anarcho-syndicalist union, the National Confederation of
Labour (CNT) to armed struggle. Frustrated by oligarchic tensions and
self-serving politicking, he moved to Paris where he worked as a reporter
for Agence France Presse from 1960 until retirement in 1986, when he
moved to Ceret in the Pyrenees and then to Perpignan.
In Paris Téllez continued to contribute to the anarchist press, but from
1954 onwards it was clear that his life’s work was to write the histories
of the legendary names of the anarcho-syndicalist action groups: Francisco
Sabaté Llopart, José Luis Facerias, Wenceslao Gimenez Orive, Francisco
Denis, Raul Carballeira, Marcelino Massana Bancells - and many more, from
the mountains and sierras of Catalonia, Aragón , Asturias and Galicia in
the north to the Levante and Extremadura in the west and east, to
Andalucia in the south.
I met Téllez for the first time in Paris in 1973. While I was on remand in
Brixton prison he had sent me a copy of his newly-published biography of
Francisco Sabaté, which I translated from Spanish into English. After my
acquittal I visited him to discuss the book, which he was constantly
updating and revising, as he did with all his work. We became firm
friends. His archives were enormous and his apartment overlooking the Pêre
Lachaise cemetery was stacked from floor to ceiling with boxes of files,
documents and photograph albums. His accomplishments in a particularly
difficult area of study were quite remarkable given that his subject
matter was clandestine groups and secretive and highly individualistic
militants who were activists rather than theorists, many of whom were
outcasts from their own organisations. I witnessed a good example of this
in Paris, when I introduced Téllez to Octavio Alberola, the coordinator of
Defensa Interior, the clandestine anarchist group responsible for
organising assassination attempts on Franco between 1962 and 1966. The two
men had never met and Alberola was taken aback when from on top of his
wardrobe, Téllez produced the original plans for the proposed 1963
assassination attempt on Franco at the Puente de los Franceses near the
Oriente Palace in Madrid. We never did discover where he acquired them.
Tellez’s published and unpublished output was phenomenal, covering the
period from Franco’s victory on 1 April 1939 to his death on 20 November
1975, and beyond. He had two main objectives: to record the lives of
selfless men who would not compromise their ideals nor treat with a system
they found villainous and vile, men who devoted their adult lives to
freeing Spain from the last of the Axis dictators. His work has been a
major contribution to the movement for the recovery of historical memory
which is now playing such an important part in contemporary Spanish
politics. Téllez’s other objective was to demonstrate that the individual
is never helpless; there is always the possibility of rebelling and
defending an idea one considers just, even in the most unfavourable and
adverse conditions.
Téllez was one of the founders of the publication Atalaya (1957-1958), and
contributed regularly to Ruta, Solidaridad Obrera (Paris), CNT, Bicicleta,
Cultura Libertaria, Polémica and Historia Libertaria, to which he brought
fresh evidence on the little-known anarchist maquis in Asturias
Unpublished works include:
1) Guerrilla Warfare in Galicia : Mario Rodríguez Losada (O Pinche, O
Langullo)
2) Atalaya.
3) Notas para una eventual ebozo biográfico de José García Tella
And many monographs on individuals, publications from 1944 to the Iberian
Liberation Council, Defensa Interior, the First of May Group, the MIL,
GARI and the collapse of the Suarez trial in Paris in 1979. When he died,
he was working on a number of projects including a history of the FIJL
from 1935, an incomplete manuscript on Action Direct, the French anarchist
action group, another incomplete manuscript on his personal relationships
with the guerrilla, and an index of the names and personal histories of
the urban and rural guerrillas. Harmonia, his partner, has indicated these
will probably be loaned to the International Institute of Social History
in Amsterdam as part of a proposed Antonio Téllez Foundation.

Kate Sharpley Library