The Anarchist Encyclopedia: |
The Anarchist Encyclopedia: |
Gaston Leval (pseudonym for Pierre Robert Pillar)Son of a French Communard, anarchist syndicalist, combatant & historian of the Spanish Revolution of 1936. Born, Saint-Denis, 20 October 1895; died 8 April 1978. Active militant in France, Spain, Argentina.
Born in the 1890s, Gaston Leval became a war-resister before the Great War, and in 1915 sought refuge from military service in Spain, where he entered the syndicalist movement and became so accepted that he was named a member of the Spanish delegation to the Red Trade Union International Congress in Moscow in 1921.
Under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera he left Spain for Argentina, where he remained from 1923 to 1936, when he returned to Spain and decided that his contribution to its revolution should be to observe the experiments in social transformation going on in towns and cities alike and to make a record for posterity. Out of this emerged a number of early pamphlets, followed by his major work, Collectives in the Spanish Civil War. For the past twenty years Leval, who returned to France when an amnesty for war-resisters was granted after World War II, has been editing his monthly journal, Cahiers de l'Humanisme Libertaire.
Very brief Gaston Leval biography in Lesser Lights page, http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/leval/levalbio.html
Collectives in Aragon http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/spain/coll_aragon.html
Collectives in the Spanish Revolution http://anarchosyndicalism.net/history/collectives.htm
"Controversy: Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution" by Sam Dolgoff , http://www.ainfos.ca/A-Infos97/1/0505.html
Ephéméride Anarchiste, in French, http://ytak.club.fr/octobre3.html
Broad collection of Spanish Revolution materials & links at the Anarchy Now site, http://recollectionbooks.com/anow/history/spain/
In Danish see Några slutsatser om de spanska kollektiven http://www.torget.se/users/c/Chilli/Leval.htm
Danny Yee's Notebooks reviews many books on the Spanish Civil War, http://www.anatomy.usyd.edu.au/danny/notes/h/Spanish_Civil_War.html
Daniel Guerin's anthology No Gods No Masters - Book 2 includes Leval, http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/leval/abb.html
References cited can be searched at International Institute of Social History, which includes a short, informative biography, Gaston Leval Papers
page created April 1999; updated Oct 2002; Nov 2003; Oct 2005
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