In October the Provisional Government decreed freedom of association and that same month the Central Directorate of the Workers' Societies was founded in Barcelona, into which those that had subsisted during the clandestinity and other new ones that had survived were integrated.

After passing through Tarragona, Tortosa and Valencia, accompanied by Élie Reclus, Arístides Rey, Fernando Garrido and José María Orense, Fanelli went to Madrid where he arrived on November 4.

From there the initial nucleus of the International emerged in Madrid, made up of twenty-one people: five construction painters, four typographers —one of them Anselmo Lorenzo -, two tailors, two engravers —one of them Tomás González Morago -, two shoemakers, a carpenter, a gilder, a lithographer, a rope maker, a horseman and a journalist.

[10][11] "Thus, the first Spanish affiliates to the AIT believed that the program of the Bakuninist secret society (suppression of the State, rejection of parliamentary politics, abolition of social classes and collectivization of property) coincided with the principles of the First International".

[14] In January 1870, the Madrid group, which already had 23 office sections, brought out the newspaper La Solidaridad, whose writing staff included Vicente López, Hipólito Pauly, Máximo Ambau, Juan Alcázar, Anselmo Lorenzo, Francisco Mora and Tomás González Morago.

[18] At the beginning of June, a few days before the start of the Congress, the Madrid Section approved the following resolution, clearly Bakuninist: "it is advised that the International completely separate itself from everything that could have a bourgeois political character".

89 delegates attended, 74 from Catalan workers' societies -33 from the textile sector and the rest from pre-industrial trades such as tailors, shoemakers or bricklayers-,[22] who would represent 15,000 members.

In addition to the Catalans, there were delegations from the Balearic Islands, Valencia, Alcoy, Cartagena, Malaga, Arahal, Jerez de la Frontera, Cádiz, Ezcaray, Valladolid, etc.

The presidency was initially held by Farga Pellicer but he handed it over to André Bastelica, a French refugee who a year later would participate in the Paris Commune.

This was a tremendous accusation leveled against bourgeois society by the victims of its iniquitous exploitation.From the first session, the congress appeared attached to the International Workingmen's Association.

[27] The first was union action - "the resistance" - on which the need to create workers' societies and to declare vindictive strikes - at this point the Bakuninists accepted the postulates of the trade unionists and thus easily defeated the cooperative sector - although the latter were not considered an end in themselves but a means to advance towards the social revolution and thus achieve "The complete emancipation of the working classes" carried out by themselves.

[29] "A new type of union action was imposed, the "solidarity resistance", which meant overcoming the old "societarism" in which each workers' society was solely responsible for its own strikes, which it had to finance with its own funds.

The Bakuninists - who had prepared the proposals in previous secret meetings of the Alliance -[41] tried to convince the "political" union delegates and cooperativists of the virtues of "anti-politicalism" but they continued to defend the Federal Republic.

This is what would also explain why the following congresses were not held in Barcelona or Catalonia, but in Zaragoza, Córdoba and Madrid, "cities that at that time were hardly relevant in terms of the labor movement".

"[48] Shortly afterwards these verses circulated calling on the workers to join the AIT:[49] The hour of justice sounds, the symbol of radical reform; our shield by currency, let it be the International.

We will have our shadow sheltered by peace, attention: that we are going to found, brothers, and our Emancipation.Not all the workers' societies existing in Spain at the time — some 195 that had about 25,000 members — were integrated into the Spanish Regional Federation of the IWA.