Les Milicies us Necessiten!
The Militias Need You!, by Cristóbal Arteche, 1936
Cristóbal Mauro Arteche de Miguel was born in Gijón in 1900. He left Spain for Cuba at the age of 17 and went on to New York where he worked as an illustrator, creating posters for plays and drawings of silent movie stars for newspapers. He moved to Argentina and worked for a newspaper which sent him as a correspondent to France.
He returned to Spain in 1932 where he produced posters advocating voting for the Left Front in the 1936 General Election and promoting the Olimpiada Popular (an alternative international sporting event that was due to be held during the Berlin Olympics).
He was in Barcelona during 1936 and during the war he produced illustrated reports from the front. After the war he crossed the border into France and managed to get on a ship to Argentina where he lived until he returned to Spain in 1962, where he died in 1964.
For this poster, reminiscent of Kitchener’s “Your Country Needs You” and Dmitri Moor’s Soviet poster “Have you volunteered?”, Arteche is thought to have used a photograph of Marlene Dietrich as a model.
The poster pasted up in Barcelona, 1936
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The CNT was founded in November 1910, with a membership of 26,000 at a conference of workers societies in Barcelona and had its first national congress the following year. A general strike was immediately called in Barcelona and the CNT was declared illegal.
By 1919 there were 700,000 members. As the CNT grew, employers became more worried and hired armed thugs (pistoleros) to intimidate or assassinate union members.
The CNT took part in revolutionary strikes and uprisings throughout the period leading up to the 1936 Revolution and Civil War, including uprisings in Catalonia, Asturias and Andalusia. By 1937 the CNT had 1.5 million members.
From the start of the attempted coup in 1936, the CNT had a decisive role in events - pushing revolutionary land and factory collectivisation, but by May 1937 the Republican Government, under the influence of the Stalinist Spanish Communist Party (PCE), was reversing its achievements, suppressing the collectives, forcing militias to join the regular army or be disbanded and arresting militants.
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