This article discusses different situations concerning the positioning of the nineteenth-century Catalan spiritism towards violence: on the one hand, with regard to capitalist's society's implementation of the industrial process; on the other, in relation to the political use of violence – ‘terror tactics’ – employed by certain anarchist sectors in Catalonia at the close of the century. As we shall see, an understanding of said positioning reveals the spiritist movement's ambiguity in this sphere. To interpret this ambiguity, one must take into account the tremendous crossroads at which its followers found themselves, midway between one society being destructured and another that, in statu nascendi, was being prestructured.