Catalonia Under Franco

When Franco’s troops entered Barcelona in January 1939, one of the regime’s stated aims was to end Catalan “separatism” for good. The Statute and the Generalitat were abolished, and Catalonia was once again just four provinces. Thousands were executed in the following years, among them President Companys, and tens of thousands of Catalans, including much of the intellectual and political class, went into exile in France and Latin America.^•

Silencing a language

In the 1940s Catalan was banned from schools, the administration, the press, radio and public signage. Posters urged people to speak Spanish, the “language of the Empire”, and street names, shop signs and even Christian names were Castilianised. Catalan books were censored or forbidden, and children were punished for speaking it at school. At home, in the family, in the Church and among friends, Catalan carried on. From the 1950s the rules gradually loosened, and by the 1960s Catalan publishing, choirs and theatre had revived, though Catalan was still excluded from schooling and official life until the end.^•

Resistance by other means

Opposition took cultural forms. The monastery of Montserrat, home of the Black Virgin, la Moreneta, became a refuge of Catalan identity; its abbot Aureli Escarré criticised the regime in Le Monde in 1963 and was forced into exile. FC Barcelona became, in the phrase coined in 1968, “more than a club”, one of the few places where crowds could express a Catalan identity. Singers of the Nova Cançó movement, such as Raimon and Lluís Llach, whose 1968 song “L’Estaca” (“The Stake”) became an anthem of resistance, sang in Catalan to packed halls. In 1968 Joan Manuel Serrat withdrew from representing Spain at Eurovision after being refused permission to sing in Catalan. In 1971 the clandestine Assemblea de Catalunya united the opposition under the slogan “Freedom, Amnesty, Statute of Autonomy”. As late as March 1974 the regime executed the young Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich by garrotte.^•

The other Catalans

The boom of the 1950s–70s drew well over a million migrants to Catalonia from Andalusia, Murcia, Extremadura and other poorer regions, who settled in the industrial belt around Barcelona, often in shanty towns and hastily built estates. Their arrival transformed Catalan society, making Spanish the everyday language of large parts of the metropolitan area. The writer Francesc Candel, himself a migrant from Valencia, called them “the other Catalans” in his 1964 book of that name. The opposition’s message, that “a Catalan is anyone who lives and works in Catalonia”, and the shared struggle against the dictatorship in the factories and neighbourhoods helped make integration, rather than ethnic division, the dominant story.^•

Why it still matters

For many Catalans the dictatorship explains everything that came after: the insistence on Catalan in schools, sensitivity to anything that seems like a Spanish state telling them how to speak, and a deep wariness of the police and courts of Madrid. For the descendants of the migrants, the same period is a story of hard work and of becoming Catalan, or of staying proudly Spanish, or both.^•

Why it matters today