Barcelona
was the capital
of autonomous Catalonia and its parliament was known as the Generalitat.
This independence was taken away by the Spanish central government
in October 1934.
The vast
majority of people in Barcelona supported the Popular
Front in
the 1936
Elections
and were rewarded by the new government re-establishing Catalona's
autonomy.
On the
19th July, 1936, members of the Anarcho-Syndicalists
(CNT) and
the Worker's
Party (POUM),
ensured the failure of the military uprising in Barcelona. The victors
immediately organized a militia committee with representatives from
all the major parties that supported the Second Republic. The provisional
government extended the power of the Generalitat to foreign trade,
banking controls, defence and property.
In May
1937 the CNT
and POUM
were suppressed
by the Assault
Guard,
the Civil
Guard and
the NKVD in Barcelona. As a result, the
Communist
Party became
the dominant force in the city. The new government headed by Juan
Negrin dismantled
the collectivization and reduced the powers of the Generalitat.
In the
final stages of the Spanish
Civil War Barcelona was heavily bombed by the Condor
Legion.
When General Francisco
Franco
took control of the city
he ordered the removal of Catalan street names and prohibited the
use of the Catalan language.
(1)
Franz
Borkenau, wrote
about Barcelona and Madrid
during the
Spanish Civil War in
his book Spanish Cockpit: An Eyewitness Account of the Political
and Social Conflicts of the Political and Social Conflicts of the
Spanish Civil War (1937)
Certainly there are fewer well-dressed people than in ordinary times,
but there are still lots of them especially women,
who display their good clothes in the streets and cafes without hesitation
or fear, in complete contrast to thoroughly proletarian Barcelona.
Because of the bright colors of the better-dressed female element,
Madrid has a much less lugubrious aspect than even the Ramblas in
Barcelona. Cafes are full, in Madrid as in Barcelona, but here they
are filled
by a different type of people, journalists. State employees, all sorts
of intelligentsia; the working class element is still in a minority.
One of the most striking features is the strong militarization of
the armed forces. Workers with rifles, but in their ordinary civilian
clothes, are quite exceptional here. The streets and cafes are full
of militia, all of them dressed in their monos, the new dark blue
uniforms; most of them do not wear any party initials on their caps.
We are under the sway of the liberal Madrid government, which favors
the army system as against the militia system favored by Barcelona
and the anarchists. Churches are closed but not burned here. Most
of the requisitioned cars are being used by Government institutions,
not political parties or trade unions. Here the governmental element
is much more in evidence. There does not even exist, in Madrid, a
central political committee. Very little expropriation seems to have
taken place. Most shops carry on without even control, let alone expropriation.
To sum up, Madrid gives, much more than Barcelona, the impression
of a town in social revolution.
(2)
George
Orwell,
Homage to Catalonia (1938)
I had come to Spain with
some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia
almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it
seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still
in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full
swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it
probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary
period was ending;
but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was
something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I
had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.
Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers
and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the
Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and
with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church
had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were
being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and
cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even
the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red
and black.
Waiters and shop-walkers
looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even
ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said
'Senor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else
'Comrade' and 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'.
Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving
a lecture from an hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There
were no private motor cars, they had all been commandeered, and all
the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red
and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from
the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements
look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery
of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro,
the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far
into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest
thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy
classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number
of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all.
Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls
or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving.
There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did
not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs
worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared,
that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie
had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers'
side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois
were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for
the time being.
(3)
Edward
Knoblaugh,
Correspondent in Spain (1937)
I made a tour of the Barcelona churches and
Rightist centers which the Left extremists had pillaged and burned
since my previous visit. A large number of churches and convents
had been destroyed during the demonstrations following the Left election
victory in February. The work of destruction had been completed during
the week preceding my arrival. Only the blackened walls remained of
the historic religious buildings. The statues and paintings had been
destroyed or removed, the altars ripped out, the stained-glass windows
broken. The burial vaults in the floors of some of the churches had
been forced open and the century-old mummified bodies of nuns and
priests had been removed from their mouldy resting-places. On the
steps of the Carmelite church were arrayed a dozen or more of the
skeletons of nuns in standing and reclining postures.
The red and black flag
of the Anarchists was everywhere - hung from balconies, suspended
from cords strung across
the thoroughfares and fastened to sticks wired to the fronts of commandeered
automobiles. No attempt was being made to police the city. Scowling
through their week-old beards, the militia, dressed in blue overalls
or simply in denim trousers and dirty shirts, with red and black neckerchiefs
about their throats, were as thick as flies. Lounging here
and there or speeding through the streets in their requisitioned private
cars with the black snouts of submachine guns protruding over the
window sills, these Catalonian Anarchists looked fierce enough to
startle even the directors of a Hollywood mob scene. Occasionally
a shot was heard as a rifle in inexperienced hands was discharged.
(4)
Manchester
Guardian (23rd July, 1936)
A first-hand account of the fierce fighting in Barcelona, in which
500 are stated to have been killed and 3,000 wounded,
is given in messages sent over the frontier today by Renter's Barcelona
correspondent. The fighting resolved itself into a series of the most
bloody street battles, in which loyal troops, assisted by armed civilians,
fought hand to hand with the rebels, who attacked repeatedly.
'The worst day was Sunday,'
says the message. 'By dusk that evening at least 300 lay dead. At
one time bodies were
lying piled on the steps of an underground railway station. The firing
was continuous from early morning. Machine-guns
and artillery were used. The Colon Hotel in Catalonia Square was shelled
in an attempt to dislodge the rebels, who were
in force there. The noise was tremendous. Besides the firing, aeroplanes
roared continuously overhead. Taxis and private cars were commandeered
to transport the wounded to hospital. There was a continuous stream
of such improvised ambulances. The hospitals were full to overflowing,
and an appeal was sent to all private doctors to come and attend patients.'
The correspondent goes
on to describe the scenes that followed the victory of the Government
forces. 'Bands of
anarchists and Communists raged through the town sacking, looting
and setting fire to every church and convent and other religious buildings.
No fewer than twenty convents and churches were razed to the ground
or seriously damaged, and only the famous cathedral remains intact,
in one religious seminary, it is stated, many priests were put to
death.
It is believed that the clergy were able to get away most of the church
treasures before the looters arrived. The mob,
drunk with victory, afterwards paraded the streets of the town attired
in the robes of ecclesiastical authorities and other
officials.
'After the fighting on
Sunday and Monday the streets were littered with the dead bodies of
men and horses. It was only
after the rebels had suffered tremendous losses that General Coded,
their commander, surrendered, and fighting continued spasmodically
in the streets for some time afterwards. Police, however, mounted
guns on the stone setts of the squares and gradually secured command
of the situation.'
(5)
Cyril
Connolly, New Statesman (21st
November 1936)
It is in Barcelona that
the full force of the anarchist revolution becomes apparent. Their
initials, CNT and FAI, are everywhere. They have taken over all the
hotels, restaurants, cafes, trains, taxis, and means of communication,
as well as all theatres, cinemas, and places of amusement. Their first
act was to abolish the tip as being incompatible with the dignity
of those who receive it, and to attempt to give one is the only act,
short of making the Fascist salute, that a foreigner can be disliked
for.
(6)
A member of the Labour Party, Emanuel
Shinwell initially
argued that the British government should give support to the Republicans
in the Spanish
Civil War. He wrote about his views in his autobiography, Conflict
Without Malice (1955)
While the war was at its height several of us
were invited to visit Spain to see how things were going with the
Republican Army. The fiery little Ellen Wilkinson met us in Paris,
and was full of excitement and assurance that the Government would
win. Included in the party were Jack Lawson, George Strauss, Aneurin
Bevan, Sydney Silverman, and Hannen Swaffer. We went by train to the
border at Perpignan, and thence by car to Barcelona where Bevan left
for another part of the front.
The reception we received
from both officials and the people was pathetic in its enthusiasm.
I had the disturbing impression that they thought it only needed the
gesture of a few visits by foreign Socialists to make victory certain.
Conditions in the city were bad. Food was very scarce and the people
were severely rationed. We were given rooms in the best hotel in the
city, but with all
the luxury of the accommodation there was hardly any food. The municipal
authorities in Barcelona invited us to a dinner attended by all the
prominent people of the town. They did their best with the food, though
it consisted, of course, of the traditional Spanish dish of fish,
shellfish, and vegetables mixed with rice and cooked in oil. In normal
times a modest amount is quite palatable, but they were short of oil,
and what they had was rancid. Where ever we went it was the same,
and I lived most of the time on oranges and water with what bread
I could get.
We drove along the Mediterranean
coast through scenery of unsurpassed beauty, marred by the appalling
poverty of the villagers, obviously in need of food and dressed in
rags. This was not so much a symptom of war as the normal condition
of the people. In the larger cities, such as Valencia, the stench
of the slums was worse than anything I have met in the Middle East.
(7)
Arthur
Koestler, Dialogue With Death
(1942)
I left Paris
on January 15th (1937), took train to Toulouse and from there flew
to Barcelona. I stayed in Barcelona for only
one day. The city presented a depressing picture. There was no bread,
no milk, no meat to be had, and there were long
queues outside the shops. The Anarchists blamed the Catalan Government
for the food shortage and organised an intensive campaign of political
agitation; the windows of the trams were plastered with their leaflets.
The tension in the city was near danger-point. It looked as though
Spain were not only to be the stage for the dress-rehearsal of the
second world war, but also for the fratricidal struggle within the
European Left.
(8)
Mary Rolfe was in Spain during the Spanish
Civil War. She wrote a letter
to Leo Hurwitz about her experiences
on 25th November, 1938.
When
the siren sounded again - this time meaning release - we went out,
Herb Matthews, Robert Capa, Ed and I, to see the damage. We found
one building which had been hit in the second bombing - twisted and
mutilated - piles of broken glass and debris in front of it - a huge
crater in front of the doorway where the bomb had fallen - a water
main cracked. Everywhere around the building - all the houses had
piles of glass and debris being swept out of them - the concussion
often creates terrific damage - in all the little streets off that
main street on which the building was had the little piles of broken
glass and debris lining them - the gutters were covered with brick
and mortar. We drove on past the Bank of Spain - the bomb had fallen
right clean through it - we went down to the port where huge craters
showed where bombs had fallen, breaking water pipes; crews were feverishly
at work repairing the damage - there was no sign of panic or terror
anywhere - people went about their daily tasks, walked in the very
spots where bombs had fallen - sat in the cafes along the waterfront
- sat on the benches along the streets. We talked to one man (Ed wrote
about him in his dispatch) - he told us most of the people had spent
the night in the refugios - thereby lessening the toll of lives. He
was calm when he told us about his demolished house - a smile on his
face when he told us he had been able to save his family and then
the full proof of what these people are made of when he said to us
in farewell "I would invite you to my house - but you see, it
isn't there anymore."
When I
first walked into the streets of Barcelona I was amazed at what I
saw. When we read about Spain in the newspapers, articles, and books,
we read of the front, of cities bombed, and I came expecting to find
a warlike - or what I thought was warlike - atmosphere over everything
and everybody. Here in Barcelona, the city goes on living its life
- shops do business, people work and sit in the cafes. When you are
in the city for a while you begin to see the effects of war. You see
that there aren't many young men in the streets - and if there are
they are in uniform, home on leave or recovering from wounds. You
see the wrecked buildings where bombs have fallen - and you see the
women and the kids, tattered, ragged, and hungry. But you see too
that everywhere are a people who are fighting for their lives, their
country - the raised fist which greets you in Salud is not just a
gesture - it means life and liberty being fought for and a greeting
of solidarity with the democratic peoples of the world. Barcelona
is a beautiful city - surrounded by hills and mountains - an ever
blue sky - palm trees lining the broad avenues - a city which in peacetime
must have been a joy to live in. And the people - how can I tell you
how wonderful they are - how truly a beautiful people the Spanish
are. They are an intelligent people and an understanding people, and
even now, in midst of their war, the education of its people goes
on - schools for kids, girls from the Basque country and Andalucia
who three months ago couldn't read, now holding down leading and important
jobs in Government agencies.
(9)
Luis
Bolin, Spain, the Vital Years (1967)
I drove up from Malaga and joined
our troops before they entered Barcelona. No attempt had been made
to defend the city. Its inhabitants were tired of fighting, sick of
their rulers, and hungry for food and peace. There had been the usual
amount of looting and much senseless destruction. Santa Maria del
Mar, a priceless jewel of Gothic art, had been burnt at the outbreak
of war; San Pedro de las Puellas, the earliest Christian monument
in Barcelona, had experienced the same fate. The stench was awful.
Unswept for years, the streets were full of autumn leaves and garbage,
part of the accumulated filth which the Reds bequeathed to every town
that they occupied for any amount of time. Near the port, at the eastern
end of the Ramblas, I saw houses damaged by bombs which had been aimed
at ships anchored in the harbour. Apart from this and from the destruction
wrought upon it by the Reds, Barcelona was unharmed.
Large quantities of food,
rushed up in endless lines of lorries from happier parts of Spain,
were being handed out by smiling, well-scrubbed girls in the blue
uniforms of the Falange. My job was to accommodate the legion of civil
servants, businessmen, and employees, already in Barcelona and eager
to set the city on its feet. Hotels had to be staffed, cleaned up,
and supplied with food and all the necessary requisites. The record
of their personnel had to be investigated, for it would have been
senseless to assign positions of trust to possible devotees of murder,
arson, and loot. To have fought against us was one thing; to be a
criminal was another. The dust at the Ritz, the best hotel in the
town, was inches thick. I told the manager to summon as many char-women
as he could find, for I needed them all. Once they arrived I reviewed
them, complete with brooms, mops and pails. 'Has the day at last arrived
for us to resume scrubbing floors?' one of them asked me. 'It certainly
has,' I replied. 'Thank God for that!' she answered, throwing up her
hands to the skies.
(10)
Annie
Murray,
Voices From the Spanish Civil War (1986)
As we were coming out of Spain - the Fascists
were getting to Barcelona as we were getting out - I was with the
Spanish surgeon and some of the others as we came through Barcelona.
We found a whole lot of children, oh, dozens of them, with their hands
off, completely off. The Italians had dropped anti-personnel bombs
marked 'Chocolate'. The children were picking up these things - they
hadn't had chocolate for years - and they just blew their hands off.
This Spanish surgeon that I worked with, he was in tears. We all were.
This sort of thing was so horrible. It left a big impression on me.
(11)
Alvarez
del Vayo, letter in the Manchester
Guardian (21st March, 1938)
I am sure that the whole of Great Britain will
have shuddered with horror on reading the news of the most recent
bombardments of Barcelona.
But I can assure you,
after having visited the entire city in which two thousand people
have been killed and an equal number wounded, that the most terrible
predictions of the coming aerial warfare have been converted here
into the most abominable reality.
The Spanish people turn
towards Great Britain and ask you to raise your voice against the
extermination of the civilian population of Barcelona and against
a policy which prevents the Spanish Government from acquiring the
means necessary to defend itself from this murder of more than a thousand
women and children in a single day.
(12)
Statement issued by General Francisco
Franco about the
bombing of Barcelona (24th March 1938)
The air raids carried out by the 'Nationalist'
air force on military
objectives in Barcelona have been reported with notorious
mendacity by the 'Red' press and part of the foreign press,
too. The 'Nationalist' air force has sought only to destroy
strictly military objectives.
'Red' barbarity has converted
the district situated in the centre
of towns into huge stores of explosives and war material.
'Red' propaganda states that some of the 'Nationalist' bombs
fell in the Cataluna Square, on the underground station of
the Metro, and the main northern railway station.
It omitted to say, however,
that these two points had been
converted into huge munition dumps, a fact which is proved
by the several explosions which took place after the falling
of the bombs. These explosions caused the collapse of
several buildings such as the Barcelona Theatre and others in
the Cataluna Square.
We regret the victims
caused amongst the civilian population,
but responsibility for these rests with the 'Red' authorities
who, violating all the laws of humanity and warfare, have placed
huge powder dumps in the middle of large cities.
(13)
Per Eriksson was born in Kragenäs,
Bohuslän (Swedish west coast - north of Gothenburg) 1907. He
worked as a seaman when the Spanish
Civil War broke out. In January 1937
he left Sweden for Spain. He joined other Scandinavians in the
Thaelmann
Battalion.
He was wounded at the battle of Jarama. The
interview originally appeared in Swedes in the Spanish Civil
War, P.A. Nordstedt & Söners Förlag, 1972.
Most
of Barcelona's population were gathered around the big street Diagonal.
I think there were a million people there. The city had been bombed
every single hour for months. But this time the Republican airplanes
were up in the air, patrolling. There was a troop-parade. There were
"carabineros" in their green uniforms, Guardia Nacional
and different fractions from the army, tank-troops… while the
Air Force was roaring by above. Then the International troops came,
straight from the front, in their shabby army-pants and shirts, not
at all as well groomed as the others from the frontline. But then
the crowd went wild. People were cheering and shouting. The women
brought their children and handed them over to the soldiers in the
International Brigade. They wanted to give them the best thing they
had. It was a fantastic sight.
(14)
Edward
Heath, The Course of
My Life (1988)
The base for our visit
was Barcelona, and we travelled there via Calais, Paris and Perpignan.
At one point, our night train came to a juddering halt. Opening the
window, we discovered that a wheel had come off, but not from our
carriage. We arrived late at Perpignan, our destination in France.
After a superb lunch in a restaurant overlooking the main square of
the town, we were then driven at breakneck speed along the coast,
a lot of it at quite a height, on the winding mountain roads down
to Barcelona. We found the capital city of Catalonia in darkness -
it was never lit up for fear of air-raids - and settled in to a comfortable
hotel. Instructions in our rooms told us to go down to the basement
in the event of an air-raid alarm. It was just as well that we did
not heed those instructions, opting instead for the excitement of
watching the bombers flying past. During one raid, a bomb went straight
down the hotel lift shaft, skittling to the bottom and killing all
those who had rushed down to the basement shelter.
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