Buenaventura Durruti

In November, having been persuaded to leave Aragón by the anarchist leader Federica Montseny on behalf of the government, Durruti led his militia to Madrid to aid in the defence of the city. On 19 November, he was shot while leading a counterattack in the Casa de Campo area (see also Battle of Madrid).

Antony Beevor in The Spanish Civil War (1982) maintains that Durruti was killed when a companion's machine pistol went off by mistake. He assessed that, at the time, the anarchists lied and claimed he had been hit by an enemy sniper's bullet "for reasons of morale and propaganda". The first rumor of his death was that he was shot by his comrades because he enforced discipline.

Durruti died on 20 November 1936, at the age of 40, in a makeshift operating theatre set up in what was formerly the Ritz Hotel. The bullet was lodged in the heart; the diagnosis recorded was "death caused by pleural haemorrhage". In his later book Durruti in the Spanish Revolution, it was alleged that Durruti was killed by a 9mm bullet to the thorax. The autopsy reported:

"Durruti had a very developed chest. Given the topography of the thorax, I realized that the diagnosis that surgery was impossible had been mistaken. An operation could have produced positive results, although doubtlessly the patient would not have survived."[8]

Following a large funeral procession,[9] he was buried in Barcelona's Montjuïc Cemetery.[10]

A few hours after Durruti's death, in reprisal, José Luzón Morales ordered the execution of 52 policemen who had been held captive in a monastery in Calle de Santa Engracia.[11]

On 14 July 1927, Durruti met French anarcho-syndicalist, writer and shorthand typist Émilienne Morin at the Librairie internationale anarchiste (International Anarchist Library) in Paris. They became life partners until his death.[12] When Durutti was expelled from France in July 1927, Morin accompanied him into Belgium, and worked to feed them both when he was unemployed. The couple travelled to Spain in 1931 and on 4 December 1931, their daughter Colette Durruti was born in Barcelona. Morin brought Collette up virtually single-handedly, with the help of an anarchist friend, Teresa Margaleff due to Durutti's absences. In 1936 Morin ran the press office for the Durutti Column and wrote many articles for French anarchist publications on the situation in Spain.[13][14] She returned to France after Durutti's death, remaining heavily involved in anarchist politics and writing, and worked to raise funds for Spanish refugees in France.[12]

At first, Durruti's death was not made public, for morale reasons. Durruti's body was transported across the country to Barcelona for his funeral. Over a half million people filled the streets to accompany the cortege during its route to the Montjuïc Cemetery. It was the last large-scale public demonstration of anarchist strength of numbers during the Spanish Civil War.

Hugh Thomas remark, "the death of Durruti marked the end of the classic age of Spanish anarchism. An anarchist poet proclaimed that Durruti’s nobility while living would cause ‘a legion of Durrutis’ to spring up behind him".[15]

In 1937, as a response to the further participation of the CNT-FAI in the Republican government, and after the May Days in 1937 in Barcelona, the Friends of Durruti Group was founded, to try and save the anarchist principles of the revolution. The name of Durruti clearly taken because of the revolutionary commitment and the symbol that he still was for that in the anarchist camp. The Friends of Durruti group had a newspaper called El Amigo del Pueblo (The Friend of the People) and tried to make revolutionary propaganda among the rank and file of the CNT. The group was however fiercely repressed by the reformist wing of the CNT, in collaboration with the Republican government.

A Situationist group of Strasbourg University students spent their student union's budget on a giant flyposted comic strip in 1966. One of its panels, featuring two cowboys discussing philosophical reification, was called The Return of the Durutti Column [sic], in reference to Durruti's military unit. This, in turn, influenced Tony Wilson's naming of his English post-punk band, The Durutti Column.[16]

Willem van Spronsen, an American anarchist who was killed in 2019 while trying to disable a fleet of buses operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for mass deportation, used Durruti's surname as a part of his alias.[17][18]

• 
  Photograph of Durruti
• 
  Funeral of Durruti, Barcelona, 23 November 1936
• 
  Durruti's grave full of flowers on the 69th anniversary of his death
• 
  Durruti's grave at Montjuïc Cemetery, Barcelona
• 
  "Hálito Durruti", monument to Buenaventura Durruti in his hometown of León

• Anarchism in Spain
• Anarchist Catalonia

• Alexander, Robert J. (1999). The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. London: Janus Publishing Company. ISBN 978-1-85756-400-6.
• Beevor, Antony (2006) [1982]. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-84832-1.
• Comotto, Agustín (2022). The Weight of the Stars: The Life of Anarchist Octavio Alberola. AK Press. ISBN 978-1-84935-409-7.
• Enzensberger, Hans Magnus (2018). Anarchy's Brief Summer: The Life and Death of Buenaventura Durruti. Translated by Mitchell, Mike. Seagull Books. ISBN 9780857426000. OCLC 1077270536.
• Fraser, Ronald (2001) [1984]. "The popular experience of war and revolution 1936–9". In Preston, Paul (ed.). Revolution and War in Spain 1931–1939. London: Routledge. pp. 225–242. ISBN 0-415-09894-7. OCLC 803661954.
• Graham, Helen (2002). The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-45932-X. OCLC 464890766.
• Loadenthal, Michael (2017). "Anarchism". In Joseph, Paul (ed.). The SAGE Encyclopedia of War: Social Science Perspectives. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publishing. pp. 60–64. ISBN 978-1-4833-5989-2.
• Paz, Abel (2006) [1996]. Durruti in the Spanish Revolution. Translated by Morse, Chuck. Edinburgh: AK Press. ISBN 1-904859-50-X. LCCN 2006920974. OCLC 482919277.
• Preston, Paul (2006). The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-32987-9.
• Ruiz, Julius (2014). The 'Red Terror' and the Spanish Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107054547.
• Thomas, Hugh (2001) [1961]. The Spanish Civil War. New York: Modern Library. ISBN 0-375-75515-2.