The Factory of Spain and the Rose of Fire
Catalonia industrialises first and fastest in Spain; Barcelona grows into a modern city of mills, a bourgeoisie, and fierce class conflict.
- La Catalogne dans l'Espagne moderne — Pierre Vilar, SEVPEN (1962)
- Barcelona — Robert Hughes, Knopf (1992)
- The Tragic Week: A Study of Anticlericalism in Spain, 1875–1912 — Joan Connelly Ullman, Harvard University Press (1968)
- Catalan Nationalism: Past and Present — Albert Balcells, Macmillan (1996)
Building on eighteenth-century cotton printing, Catalonia was the one part of Spain to industrialise early. The Bonaplata mill in Barcelona, Spain’s first steam-powered factory, opened in 1832 (and was burned by rioters three years later), and the peninsula’s first railway ran from Barcelona to Mataró in 1848. Textile colonies lined the rivers of the interior. In 1854 Barcelona tore down its medieval walls, and Ildefons Cerdà’s grid plan for the Eixample let the city spread across the plain.
- La Catalogne dans l'Espagne moderne — Pierre Vilar, SEVPEN (1962)
- Barcelona — Robert Hughes, Knopf (1992)
Industry brought a confident bourgeoisie and a huge, poor working class, and Barcelona became one of Europe’s centres of anarchism. Bombings, such as the attack on the Liceu opera house in 1893, and brutal repression earned the city the name la rosa de foc, “the rose of fire”. In July 1909 a general strike against the call-up of reservists for a colonial war in Morocco turned into the Setmana Tràgica, the Tragic Week, in which dozens of churches and convents were burned and the army crushed the revolt. Gunmen of employers and unions fought a dirty war in the streets until General Primo de Rivera, then captain-general in Barcelona, seized power in a coup in 1923.
- The Tragic Week: A Study of Anticlericalism in Spain, 1875–1912 — Joan Connelly Ullman, Harvard University Press (1968)
- Barcelona — Robert Hughes, Knopf (1992)
- Catalan Nationalism: Past and Present — Albert Balcells, Macmillan (1996)
Why it matters today
Catalans' self-image as hard-working, enterprising and more "European" than the rest of Spain was forged here, as was the long grievance that a productive Catalonia was governed by an agrarian, bureaucratic Madrid. The tradition of anarchism and labour struggle left another legacy: a Barcelona that takes to the streets.