Education
He attended the University of Barcelona, then went to Buenos Aires, Argentina to teach.
He attended the University of Barcelona, then went to Buenos Aires, Argentina to teach.
Born in Catalonia in 1870, Portet was raised in Barcelona, Spain. In 1895, after five years away, Portet returned to Spain and soon got involved in an insurrection. 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 Company-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.
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.