Contra el feixisme

Propaganda in Revolutionary Catalonia

I went to Barcelona and Paris a few weeks ago so I thought I’d write a quick post about some of the fantastic propaganda that came out of Revolutionary Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, when the various anti-fascist parties sought to fight on a “visual” as well as military front.

Catalonia — specifically Barcelona — had long served as something of a petri dish for left-wing radicalism. For almost a century radical movements such as anarchism had been able to endure, expand and evolve in Catalonia before culminating in 1936 with the extraordinary but short-lived triumph in Barcelona.

The brief triumph of l’anarcosindicalisme in Catalonia was a long time coming. After centuries of comparative decline, the nineteenth century brought Catalonia a sudden upsurge in culture and wealth. Barcelona especially was transformed in a matter of years to such a degree that it was able to hold a world’s fair in 1888 (the year in which the General Union of Workers, or UGT, was also founded) through which the city flaunted its flashy buildings, boulevards and new neighbourhoods to the nations of the world.

“The militias need you!” — a Catalan poster from 1936

Artists and architects flocked to the city to begin work on dozens of ambitious projects — projects that required a lot more labour, which meant more workers crammed into ever-smaller housing receiving ever-worse pay. Catalonia’s rapid industrialisation led to decades of exploitation, precarious employment, deteriorating working conditions and civil strife, all of which allowed anarchist groups to flourish in Catalonia as nowhere else in Europe.

Before the civil war there were intermittent outbreaks of violence. The most famous was the mini-revolution of the Setmana Tràgica or “Tragic Week” in which hundreds of civilians were gunned down on the streets by the army and Civil Guard, but there was also Asturias in 1934, a strike-turned-uprising that Francisco Franco crushed with brutality that presaged the later Nationalist atrocities of the civil war. The Asturias uprising would later form an important part of the mythology of the Spanish left (see below).