UAB: The twisted wood of the Catalan Francoists | Literature

In the recent and extraordinary (Saidí, 1972) he tells us about the centrality of war in the human experience. For the Aragonese writer, Berlin is one of the best epitomes: yesterday as a decisive stage of the Second World War, today as a refuge for Ukrainian exiles. Saving the distances, Barcelona is also indestructible from the scars of war which, only in modern times, include the Bourbon siege of 1714, the French war, the Carlinades, the 19th century riots with government bombings, the Tragic Week, the gunfight and the anarchist attacks in October 1934 and the

The importance of the censorship marked by 1939 in the biographies of contemporaries is unquestionable. The new regime divided the world between victors and vanquished, and admitted neither warmth nor equidistance. However, time facilitated subsequent evolutions from the forceful initial alignments. This blurring was favored by a professional historiography and a civic memory very focused on recovering the losers. Many, also executioners and perpetrators, knew how to take advantage of the situation to rewrite themselves or simply disappear.

For a quarter of a century, the UAB professor and director of the Carles Pi i Sunyer Archive (Barcelona, ​​1962) has dedicated his research to the victors in that year zero of the dictatorship. Catalans of 1939 has the first right in the title, because within the heterogeneous coalition of the local winners, little linked them beyond sharing a side. The Manicheism characteristic of wars is exacerbated when the conflict is civil and with a strong class component, and with such high levels of repression in the midst of an international context of ideological antagonism.

In Catalonia, the few historical Falangists and/or members of the initial coup coalition were later joined by radical converts, conniving allies and people with varying degrees of conviction and involvement. The latter, many of them members of the bourgeoisie and/or leaguers, were of a falangism and fascism that was more rhetorical than real. In the words of Vilanova himself, “they must have been Francoists, because of the return to order and the recovery of assets and heritage; it would become a pragmatic and convenient Francoism”. Now, whether convinced or not, active or reactive, they quickly discovered that the parameters of the previous Primoriverist dictatorship did not work and that, not by chance, the army called itself “of occupation”. In addition to the ideological repression common to the rest of Spain, a re-Spanishization program would be deployed here.

Catalans of 1939 exhumes texts and attitudes that recover the harshness of the original objective of the new authorities and exposes the complicity and acquiescence of pro-people of the period. The still photo is real and cruel – especially for Destino’s writing, Vilanova’s recurrent obsession – and better fits what really happened with our historical account. However, he already warned us to avoid falling into the absolutes that nothing straight can come out of the crooked wood of humanity. And it is just as cheating to hide that they were victorious as not to include in the portrait everything that happened before and the subsequent developments.