page_title: Francesc Pi i Margall
section_title: Political thought, practice and later influence
hierarchical_section_title: Francesc Pi i Margall / Political thought, practice and later influence
caption_attribution_description: Español: Caricatura de la República publicada en La Flaca en 1873. Pi i Margall se ve desbordado por el federalismo, representado en figuras infantiles ataviadas con los distintos trajes regionales, mientras Castelar intenta poner orden instruyendo a los alumnos.
context_page_description: Francisco Pi y Margall was a Spanish federalist and republican politician and theorist who served as president of the short-lived First Spanish Republic in 1873. He also was a historian, philosopher, romanticist writer, and was also the leader of the Federal Democratic Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Pi was turned into a sort of secular saint in his time.
  A disciple of Proudhon, his theoretical contributions left a lasting effect on the development of the anarchist movement in Spain.
context_section_description: Pi i Margall became the principal translator of Proudhon's works into Spanish and later briefly became president of Spain in 1873 while being the leader of the Democratic Republican Federal Party. According to George Woodcock, "These translations were to have a profound and lasting effect on the development of Spanish anarchism after 1870, but before that time Proudhonian ideas, as interpreted by Pi, already provided much of the inspiration for the federalist movement which sprang up in the early 1860s." According to the Encyclopædia Britannica "During the Spanish revolution of 1873, Pi i Margall attempted to establish a decentralized, or “cantonalist,” political system on Proudhonian lines."
  Pi considered federalism to be a "unity in variety, the law of nature, the law of the world", an organization based on the bottom-up contract by "natural and spontaneous collective beings" (La reacción y la revolución, 1854).
  Pi i Margall was a dedicated theorist in his own right, especially through book-length works such as La reacción y la revolución (English: "Reaction and revolution" from 1855), Las nacionalidades (English: "Nationalities" from 1877), and La Federación from 1880. For prominent anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker "The first movement of the Spanish workers was strongly influenced by the ideas of Pi i Margall, leader of the Spanish Federalists and disciple of Proudhon. Pi i Margall was one of the outstanding theorists of his time and had a powerful influence on the development of libertarian ideas in Spain. His political ideas had much in common with those of Richard Price, Joseph Priestly (sic), Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and other representatives of the Anglo-American liberalism of the first period. He wanted to limit the power of the state to a minimum and gradually replace it by a Socialist economic order."
  He was also a supporter of a decentralized version of Iberian Federalism, framing the realization of such prospect in terms of "Iberian nations". He was wary of centralism—alien to the internal organization of the inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula and imposed on them according to Pi—, which he deemed to be along monarchy one of the root reasons behind the state of decadence of the Peninsular peoples.
  He showed a special and naive affection for the United States.
caption: Cartoon depicting political figures of the First Spanish Republic, featuring Pi in the middle sporting a phrygian cap.
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