The rapidity of Ferrer's rise troubled Spanish church and state authorities, who viewed the school as a front for insurrectionary activity.

Ferrer was held in association with the 1906 assassination attempt on the Spanish King, which was used as a pretext for closing the school, but was ultimately released without conviction under international pressure a year later.

Ferrer traveled Europe as an advocate of the Spanish revolutionary cause, founded a libertarian education advocacy organization, and reopened his press.

The protest became a movement to propagate his educational ideas, and Modern Schools in his name sprouted across the United States and Europe, reaching into Brazil and Asia.

[5] While his parents were pious Catholics, he grew independent and anti-clerical convictions from his freethinker uncle and militant atheist first employer.

After supporting an attempted coup under General Manuel Villacampa del Castillo who intended to install a Spanish Republic in late 1886, Ferrer was himself forced to flee to France with his wife and three daughters, where they would stay for 16 years.

[9] In Paris, Ferrer taught Spanish, sold wine on commission, volunteered as Ruíz's secretary (until his 1895 death), and pursued radical efforts.

He met Louise Michel, Elisée Reclus, Sébastien Faure, befriended Charles Malato and Jean Grave, and bonded with Spanish anarchists Anselmo Lorenzo and Fernando Tarrida del Mármol.

He believed that social and economic environment played a larger role in a child's development than heredity, and so his school aimed to provide nature, exercise, love, and understanding, especially towards children normally subject to stigma.

Around 1900, Ferrer declared his intention to open a similar libertarian school, which became plausible when he inherited around a million francs from a middle-aged French woman whom he had tutored in Spanish and convinced of his ideas.

[12] With a large inheritance from a Parisian tutee, Ferrer returned to Spain in 1901, where he would open the Barcelona Modern School, Escuela Moderna.

[13] Liberals and radicals wanted more secular curriculum, with new scientific, historical, and sociological content and teachers not beholden to diocesan inspectors.

It combined play and crafts alongside academic work and championed traits of reason, dignity, self-reliance, and scientific observation over that of piety and obedience.

This model's adherents, in seeking a school that eschewed religious and political authority, thought that changes in mass education would circumvent the stunted public enlightenment and preservation of status quo that they blamed on the influence of both church and state.

The Escuela Moderna charged sliding scale tuition based on parental capacity to pay, and divided students into three curricular levels.

[21] The Escuela Moderna additionally hosted a school to train teachers and a radical publishing press, which translated and created more than 40 textbooks adequate for Ferrer's purposes, written in accessible language on recent scientific concepts.

Propaganda and agitation were central to the Escuela Moderna's aims, as Ferrer dreamt of a society in which people constantly renewed themselves and their environment through experimentation.

The Escuela Moderna's program, from Ferrer's anticlericalism to the quality of guest intellectual lecturers, had impressed even middle-class liberal reformers.

His monetary inheritance and organizing ability amplified his subversive efforts,[27] and authorities viewed his school as a front for insurrectionary sentiment.

[28] Ferrer represented peril to many social institutions—the church, the state, the military, the family, gender segregation, property—and the conservatives who wished to preserve them.

[29] During the school's early years, Ferrer adopted principles of anarcho-syndicalism, a philosophy of worker co-ownership that grew in prominence during this period.

He was subject to slanderous public rumors to tarnish his reputation, including intonations of gambling, financial speculation, and hedonism.

[28] In 1905, Ferrer and the Modern School voiced their opposition to bullfighting, cautioning against using abolition of the practice as a means to stoke political nationalism.

[30] He was held in association with the 1906 assassination attempt on Spanish King Alfonso XIII, but ultimately released under international pressure the next year.

Conservative members of lower house of Spain's legislature unsuccessfully proposed that all secular schools be closed for their promotion of antisocial behaviors.

Based on papers from French and Spanish authorities, Maura argues that Ferrer supplied the bombs and funds for the attempt to provoke insurrection.

[34] These types of official records from this period, however, were famous for their partiality and, even before some evidence from the case went missing, were altogether insufficient for conviction in Ferrer's time.

The general strike called by Solidaridad Obrera culminated in a week of riots, which killed hundreds in and around Barcelona, and mass arrests, which led to torture, deportation, and execution.

[3] Historian Paul Avrich later summarized the case as "judicial murder", a successful attempt to quell an agitator whose ideas were dangerous to the status quo, as retribution for not convicting him in the Morral affair.

[37] British luminaries spoke in outrage, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle alongside anarchists Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Tarrida.