Leadership Quote by Frederica Montseny

Urgency is baked into Montseny’s verbs: “tried,” “attempted,” “stir,” “raise.” This isn’t the language of a stateswoman calmly managing a crisis; it’s the language of an organizer who thinks history can be grabbed by the lapels and shaken into motion. The phrase “speed on” is especially revealing. Revolutions, in this view, don’t simply arrive when conditions ripen; they can be accelerated by will, propaganda, agitation, the deliberate engineering of collective emotion.

That’s the subtext: a frank admission that political transformation is partly a craft of sentiment. “Stir up the feelings of the people” is both candid and risky. It rejects the comforting myth that mass politics is purely rational persuasion. Montseny is naming the emotional infrastructure of revolutionary change: anger at landlords, hope of dignity, the thrill of solidarity. Critics would call it manipulation; she frames it as awakening.

“Raise the banner” pushes the line into symbolism and commitment. A banner isn’t a policy program; it’s an identity marker, a rallying object that simplifies complexity into allegiance. And “Libertarian Communism” is a loaded pairing, insisting that freedom and collectivism are not enemies but twins - a direct rebuttal to the authoritarian currents that often marched under the communist label.

Context does the rest of the work. Montseny emerged from Spain’s anarchist milieu and later became a leading figure in the CNT-FAI world, where the Spanish Revolution was imagined not as a distant endgame but as an imminent possibility, repeatedly rehearsed through strikes, insurrections, and cultural organizing. The line reads like a justification and a memorial: we pushed, we failed before, we kept pushing - because the alternative was accepting a Spain that never made room for the future we wanted.