Refuting the Legend: On the Words and Life of Louis Mercier-Vega
by James Stout
Zine #33 — September 2024
James Stout gives us an introduction to the life and words of Louis Mercier Vega, an anarchist writer who fought with the International Group of the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, along with an English translation of Louis' piece Refuting the Legend from the original in French.
Louis Mercier Vega, was not born with that name. Nor was he born as Charles Riddel, or Damaski, Santiago Parane, or Courami. But he lived not so much as a person as a, to use his own words, “a federation of pseudonyms.” He was born as Charles Cortvrint in Brussels, fought as Charles Riddel in Spain, and wrote and fought again as Louis Mercier-Vega in France. He changed his name perhaps to avoid the persecution of the state, but also so as not to be defined by his past. His engagement with that past later, both the high points and the low points, has been instructive to me as an anarchist historian writing the history of anarchists at war. Often it can be tempting to look back for examples, or to bolster my conviction that people can take care of one another without controlling one another. But doing this should not prevent historians, even those aligned with the people they study, from seeing and learning from mistakes made in the past.
Mercier-Vega had been an anarchist since the age of 16, and at the time the Spanish Civil War and revolution began, he was living in France to avoid compulsory military service in Belgium where he had previously tried to organize soldiers committees. His anarchist group, “Moules à gauffre” (The Waffle Irons), was composed of revolutionary young people who were eager to put anarchism into action. The month before they left for Spain they were active in factory operations and stayed with Simone Weil while organizing factory workers in Paris. Following this experience, Riddel (as he was known at the time) heard about the revolution in Spain and quickly decided to join it. He was accompanied by Charles Carpentier, another member of the Waffle Irons, when he set off for Spain as soon as he got his next pay packet.
Like many other anarchists in the weeks after the coup, he probably took trains south before walking across the Pyrenees. Border crossings at that time were already in the control of local committees, and so on arrival in Spain, he would have been greeted by comrades in arms. From there, he would have taken collectivized transport to Barcelona, where militias were forming. In Barcelona, he found other international volunteers and joined the Sebastian Faure Centuria of the Durruti column, a group of 100 or so French-speaking anarchists. Mercier- Vega called them “"the international legion of the Sans-patria who came to fight in the peninsula for the workers' and revolutionary order." Leaving Barcelona in late July, they marched south to liberate Zaragoza, an anarchist stronghold that had fallen into the hands of the military.
Fighting on the Aragon front as Charles Ridel, he joined Italians, French people, Algerians, and Germans in the international group. They lived and fought together while organizing democratically and electing their delegates. The much-loved and well-respected anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti was their delegate general. Their weapons were hopelessly outdated, and their ammunition scarce and unreliable. Their hand grenades sometimes didn’t go off at all, and sometimes went off on their own, and they still wore their blue workers' overalls, but they had become an effective fighting unit by the late summer of 1936.
At Perdiguera, a name that lives in infamy among historians and veterans of the Durruti column, his unit was surrounded by advancing Spanish and Moroccan soldiers and pinned down in a barn with their wounded comrades. They fought until they were almost out of ammunition and surrounded by the bodies of their friends. Riddel and Charles Carpentier took on the risky task of slipping through enemy lines to try and get reinforcements, but unbeknownst to them other centurias had been ordered to withdraw. Only one other member of his unit survived, the rest were killed, or captured and then killed.
It was after this horrific miscommunication, which some saw as a deliberate betrayal, that Riddel was sent home from the front lines. He toured France instead, raising funds and awareness for the revolution in Spain. While he was away, “militarization gradually crept into the anarchist columns he’d fought for. Ranks were introduced, as was the (largely theoretical) obligation to salute one’s superiors. Women were removed from front-line positions, and in turn, the anarchist columns were supplied with the weapons and ammunition the Republic had withheld from them. At the same time, three CNT members entered the Popular Front government, and in the eyes of many of the rank and file workers they began to see its interests as shared with theirs and left behind the concerns and goals of the masses.
The government of the Republic became gradually more dominated by the Soviet Union, which was one of the only countries willing to sell it arms. The Republic’s gold reserves were transferred to Moscow before the anarchists could execute their plan to steal them and use them to buy weapons, and gradually more Soviet “advisors” began making their way to Spain. The resulting political shifts made things harder and harder for the anarchists, and tensions came to a head in May 1937 in Barcelona. Assault Guards attempted to enter the collectivized telephone exchange and workers barricaded themselves inside. Within hours the rhetorical battle between those who wished to proceed with the revolution while fighting the war, and those who thought the latter was impossible to win while doing the former, became a physical one. It ended with anarchists dead in the streets, and the revolution in Barcelona all but crushed.
In the months that followed, the Durruti column was militarized, and comradeship was replaced with command. Anarchists were left facing persecution by Republican intelligence in the rearguard, and the increasingly capable Francosit army that was augmented by Italian and German fascist weapons and auxiliary fighters. Like many others, Charles Riddel grew disillusioned with the situation in Spain. In his eyes, the leadership of the CNT became “intoxicated by their own speechifying, admiring themselves in the mirror in their general’s outfit.” Gradually, he watched the dream his friends died for slipping away, and eventually, he had to do the same himself. “It was better to let oneself be written off as a coward and deserter,” he wrote, “and be in a position to proclaim the truth.”
His proclamation of the truth, and his bank robberies, saw him wanted in France, from where he fled to South America using the name Louis Mercier-Vega. In South America, he enjoyed the solidarity of comrades in Argentina and Chile but felt the pull to return to the fight against fascism. He returned, via French Africa, to fight fascism a second time as part of the free French army, now using “Louis Mercier” and claiming to have been born in Chile.
In 1945 he demobilized and spent the rest of his life writing under his many names in as many outlets and organizing against totalitarianism in all its forms. After the death of his partner, and the publication of his final works, he took his own life in 1977. His body was left to medical research, his funds to radical groups, and his writings to the world at large.
In his writing after the war in Spain, Mercier-Vega battled with how to remember a moment that contained so much hope but ended with so much disappointment. How was he to remain true to the ideal his friends died for while also learning from the movement’s failings. The next revolution would not be so short-lived. His writing, particularly the piece I have translated below, captures the revolutionary moment and the strange ecstasy and the agony of defeat of conflict better than anything else I’ve read.
Refuting the Legend
by Louis Mercier Vega
Constructed as it was by men, the Spanish Revolution is neither a perfect construction nor a fairy tale castle. The first task necessary for our balance is to re-examine the civil war using documents and facts and not to cultivate nostalgia through our exaltations. This is a task that has never been carried out with conscience and courage because it would have resulted in laying bare not only the weaknesses and betrayals of others but also our illusions and our failings, as libertarians.
The mania that amounts to us bragging about our acts of heroism and our abilities of improvisation is deadly because it reduces the search for social solutions, through an artifice of propaganda, to an individual struggle and it erases the situation in which we were unable to cope. The tendency to magnify activists of the CNT and the FAI masks our powerlessness to work efficiently wherever we find ourselves or in places where we are working and find ourselves in a position to intervene. Too often, it’s used as an escape from our time and our world. Not to mention the fact that the Spanish militants find themselves absolved of their responsibilities and instead hover like the idols of the saints who they know they are not, and frozen in their old postures when they ought to keep acting with their eyes wide open.
We can not live in disdain for the present in order to argue that what once was never again will be, with pride covering our retreat. Spain did not popup because of random societal changes any more than it was the only crucible in which individual destines were melted together. So let's avoid stories that transfigure the past and provide an alibi for our present fatigue. While nothing is left but Images d’Épinal, the betrayal of the survivors is taken for granted.
In 1956 [the time of writing], the hope of a return and revenge assume, perhaps more clearly than in 1936, the form of a beautiful ending rather than an engagement with reality. To the many revolutionaries who flocked to a Spain in flames and at war, it was not a hope, but the end of hope, the ultimate sacrifice savored as a defiance of a complicated and absurd world, a tragic exit from a world where the dignity of man is violated day in and day out. Completely dedicated to the realization of their individual destinies in a situation where they might give everything, they barely entertained the thought of tomorrow.
This is how in their heart of hearts, in the isolation which is the answer to vomiting, and in the promiscuity of a banal existence, returning to July 1936 is cultivated, like the anticipation of a great and barbaric religious festival. Let’s steer clear of such a fate if we want to avoid a life of disappointment and bitterness. The cerebral dynamite of Spain in 1936 withered and dies in the sun of misery and revolt. It exploded and was lost beyond the four horizons of the peninsula and the world, leaving behind only poverty and factories in revolt. Courage was not found only sitting behind the tripod of a machine gun. Heroism was not spent only in the moments of attack. Both were etched into the bedrock of daily existence and gave a framework to the episodic passions of the masses. Yesterday, as today, they have to contend with the absurdity that emanates from economic formulas and the changing clamors of the crowd.
The high cost of this painful apprenticeship in the awareness of social situations is one we cannot squander, whether in Spain or anywhere else. Libertarian passion only takes on value in response to the problems at hand, it can not be squandered on apocalypses of circumstance or morose exaltations. It draws strength from the experience of the militant clutching their rifle as a guarantee of his independence, but also in the effort of the anonymous worker who carries lucid dreams with them and lays the foundation for a future less wrought with despair.
In the curious universe in which we live, false hopes can let us forget the hundred methods that conspired together to form totalitarianisms that are neither courageous nor heroic. Individual courage and individual audacity can intervene against schemes, statistics, and facts. As much as the action of voluntary communities can weigh on the destiny of the world, as long as there is planning and measurement.
In the fox holes dug into the hillsides of Aragon, men lived fraternally and dangerously and without the need for hope because they were living fully conscious of being what they had always wanted to be. We have tried to enter into a dialogue with them, with the dead, to persevere whatever of their truth can be useful for the survivors and the living. Bianchi the thief who offered up the proceeds of his burglaries to buy weapons. Staradolz, the Bulgarian vagabond who died like a lord. Bolshakov, the Mahknovist who, although finding himself without horses, continued the spirit of revolution in Ukraine. Snatin, from Bourdeaux, whole tattoos showed the haunting fears of a pure life. Giua, the young thinker from Milan who came to burn himself out in the open air. Gimenez-of-many-names who showed us the strength of a weak body. Manolo, whose fearlessness gave us a yardstick with which to measure our own daring.
Of all of these, and thousands of others, all that remains are trace chemicals, the residues of bodies burned with petrol, and the memory of brotherhood. We were shown proof that a collective life with neither good nor master was possible, but alongside people as they actually are in the context of a world such as people have made it, is possible.
Why would that example be pertinent only in times when tensions were high? Why could we not forge our own destiny, day by day?
About the Author
James Stout (he/him), PhD, is a Adjunct Professor of World History, journalist, writer, and podcaster. He is the author of The Popular Front and the Barcelona 1936 Popular Olympics and an upcoming book on anarchists at war for AK Press as well as the co-host of It Could Happen Here. He participates in mutual aid work with migrants whenever he can.