Name Lorenzo Portet | Died May 10, 1917 | |
Lorenzo Portet (1870 - 10 May 1917) was a Spanish anarchist and an associate of anarchist and educational reformer Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia).
Biography
Born in Catalonia in 1870, Portet was raised in Barcelona, Spain. He attended the University of Barcelona, then went to Buenos Aires, Argentina to teach. In 1895, after five years away, Portet returned to Spain and soon got involved in an insurrection. He fled to Paris where in 1896 he met Francesc Ferrer i Guardia, founder of the Escuela Moderna or Modern School movement. He returned to Barcelona to get information and report on the radicals being tortured there. He then returned to Paris where he ran the publishing house Ferrer had established. After Ferrer was executed in 1909, Portet led a mass demonstration in Paris in front of the Spanish embassy. Though Ferrer left him his house in Paris, his publishing house and stock in Barcelona, and shares in two companies to enable Portet to carry on Ferrer's work, Portet was arrested and expelled from France. Seeking to carry on the work of the Escuela Moderna movement, Portet fled to Liverpool, England where he taught Spanish at the Commercial College and Portet helped to set up an anarcho-communist school in the Toxteth Co-operative Hall.
In 1915, Portet met American radical and fellow exile, Margaret Sanger, in a Liverpool cafe. Though married with children, he began an affair with Sanger, who agreed to become the English director of Ferrer's Paris publishing firm. After the two travelled together to London, Wales, Paris and Spain, Sanger decided to return to Canada, pick up her children and then move with them to Paris to be with Portet. However, she was unable to return immediately, and a few months later the younger child, Peggy, died. In mourning, she delayed her return still longer. In the interim, Portet, suffering from tuberculosis, died suddenly on May 10, 1917 in a nursing home in Paris.