Barcelona: An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888-1929

Oliver Hochadel, Agustí Nieto-Galan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317176190
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The four decades between the two Universal Exhibitions of 1888 and 1929 were formative in the creation of modern Barcelona. Architecture and art blossomed in the work of Antoni Gaudi­ and many others. At the same time, social unrest tore the city apart. Topics such as art nouveau and anarchism have attracted the attention of numerous historians. Yet the crucial role of science, technology and medicine in the cultural makeup of the city has been largely ignored. The ten articles of this book recover the richness and complexity of the scientific culture of end of the century Barcelona. The authors explore a broad range of topics: zoological gardens, natural history museums, amusement parks, new medical specialities, the scientific practices of anarchists and spiritists, the medical geography of the urban underworld, early mass media, domestic electricity and astronomical observatories. They pay attention to the agenda of the bourgeois elites but also to hitherto neglected actors: users of electric technologies and radio amateurs, patients in clinics and dispensaries, collectors and visitors of museums, working class audiences of public talks and female mediums. Science, technology and medicine served to exert social control but also to voice social critique. Barcelona: An urban history of science and modernity (1888-1929) shows that the city around 1900 was both a creator and facilitator of knowledge but also a space substantially transformed by the appropriation of this knowledge by its unruly citizens.

1 Introduction

Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan¹

At the beginning of his novel City of Marvels, Spanish writer Eduardo Mendoza, sketches with a few brush strokes a scientific panorama of Barcelona in the nineteenth century:

[...] Barcelona was always at the forefront of progress. In 1818, the first regular stagecoach service in Spain went into operation between Barcelona and Reus. The first experimental gaslight system was installed in the courtyard of the Palace of La Lonja, housing the Chambers of Commerce, in 1826. In 1836, the first steam-powered motor went into operation [...] Spain’s first railroad was built to link Barcelona and Mataró, dating from 1848. The first electric power station was likewise built in Barcelona, in the year 1873. The gap between Barcelona and the rest of the peninsula was enormous, and the city made an overwhelming impression on the newcomer.²

With an image of a city marked by technological innovation and brimming with energy and promise, Mendoza sets the stage for the meteoric career of his protagonist. City of Marvels begins in 1887 when the young Onofre Bouvila, barely a teenager, comes from the Catalan countryside to the bustling city. His first job is to hand out anarchist pamphlets to workers in the Parc de la Ciutadella, the site of the first Universal Exhibition in Barcelona to be celebrated the following year. As the story unfolds, Onofre rises from abject poverty to power and wealth propelled by his relentless criminal energy. Mendoza’s novel ends in May 1929 on the very day the second major exhibition, the International Exhibition, opens this time located on the other side of town, at the foot of Montjuïc. In a spectacular ascent, Onofre rises vertically into the air with a seemingly miraculous machine, leaving the masses speechless only to disappear into the Mediterranean Sea. He had urged a Catalan inventor and a German engineer to collaborate in order to develop this flying contraption. The machine has roughly the shape of a helicopter – the dernier cri of aeronautic technology at the time. Yet it lacks a propeller – a ‘wonder’ as Mendoza writes, tongue in cheek.

City of Marvels, first published in Spanish in 1986, was written amidst the great expectations created by the Olympic Games which Barcelona was to host in 1992. Once again, we might say, the city was eager to catch up with ‘modernity’ as it had done a century earlier, casting off the grey vestiges of the oppressive Franco regime (1939–1975). For Mendoza this era between the two international exhibitions in 1888 and 1929 serves as a mirror for his own present. Despite ‘being first’ on so many accounts, the Catalans – their ruling class of bourgeois industrialists – were unable to assume a leading political role in Spain. Instead they were being bamboozled by ‘Madrid’, the Spanish central power, who was reaping the cream of the two exhibitions for the greater glory of Spain. And – couched in the sometimes funny, sometimes bitter sarcasm of his ‘mock historical novel’ – Mendoza sees the same danger lurking on the horizon with the Olympics of 1992 in the making.³

In spite of Mendoza’s gloomy prognosis that a major international event such as the Olympic Games would be high-jacked once more by the Spanish state, Barcelona was able to gain the world’s attention and to maintain it. The Games did not only convert the city into a major tourist destination. Still in the Olympic year of 1992, art critic and journalist Robert Hughes lamented in his acclaimed book Barcelona the lack of international attention for the city and its history.⁴ Yet more than two decades later, the political and social history of Barcelona in our Mendozian timeframe (1888–1929) and until the end of the Spanish Civil War (1939) is much trodden turf. In those closing years of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, rapid industrialization, the dramatic changes in the physiognomy of the city (its expansion and the new architecture) and the increasing social unrest with all its violent manifestations have attracted the interest of social historians, urban scholars, historians of architecture and of art, just as Hughes had demanded.⁵ Barcelona is known for its modernist art (art nouveau) and its architecture. Architects such as Antoni Gaudí, Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Josep Puig i Cadafalch and painters such as Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso and Antoni Tàpies are nowadays crucial for the marketing of the city.⁶ More than that, historians from near and far have discovered Barcelona, from among other labels, as the ‘world capital of anarchism’ in the first third of the twentieth century as an intriguing object of investigation.⁷ Yet in our perception this thriving research on fin-de-siècle Barcelona is incomplete. This ever-increasing amount of scholarship rarely addresses at all the role of science (as science, technology and medicine) in this epoch.⁸

What we would like to borrow from City of Marvels is not only the timeframe but also Mendoza’s perceptiveness about the role of science. Nowadays it is a commonplace that the years between 1888 and 1929 were formative in the creation of ‘modern’ Barcelona.⁹ Yet what Mendoza clearly grasps is that scientific progress was both a driving agent and a tangible result of this process. City of Marvels abounds with references to technological innovation indicating a seemingly successful modernization. These four decades between the two international exhibitions seem to us an ideal historical window to pursue our project on the scientific culture of Barcelona.

At that time, the city was in a permanent state of construction. Between 1888 and 1929, Barcelona, the ‘Catalan Manchester’, as it was often referred to, grew substantially, to roughly one million inhabitants. Industrial growth demanded a new labour force and shaped its urban geography and architecture with new transport networks and infrastructures. The second industrial revolution brought electricity and chemistry to the already powerful textile industry run by steam. A substantial cluster of textile factories grew in highly industrialized areas such as Poble Nou, but also in the surrounding towns such as Sant Martí de Provençals and Sant Andreu del Palomar. In the search for cheaper sources of energy, other factories moved to the countryside next to the rivers to profit from hydraulic power. This network of circulation of raw materials, workers and finished products, shaped the scientific culture of Barcelona for decades.¹⁰

Figure 1.1 A general view of Barcelona and its harbour during the opening of the 1888 International Exhibition.

At the turn of the century, Barcelona’s landscape of scientific institutions also changed dramatically. To name but a few of the most relevant ones: In 1882, the Museu Martorell, the first public museum (dedicated to natural history and related fields) opened in the Parc de la Ciutadella. In 1887, the Laboratori Microbiològic Municipal was founded, not least to fight or even better prevent the recurrent epidemics. The rise of Catalan nationalism at the very end of the nineteenth century led to a host of new institutions. In 1899, the Institució Catalana d’Història Natural was founded, in 1907 the Institut d’Estudis Catalans. The latter was an ambitious project for a new ‘national’ (Catalan) research centre embracing all fields of knowledge.¹¹

Yet the dynamic of the local scientific culture resulted – as in many other cities at the time – from a combination of this ‘official’ or ‘elite’ science with a vibrant ‘public’ or ‘civic’ science.¹² Obviously these two kinds of science are often intrinsically connected and hard to separate. In terms of civic science, Barcelona was home to a wide variety of activities and institutions: public lectures, exhibitions, university extension courses, collections of living wild animals, amateur astronomical observations, international conferences on popular but controversial fields such as spiritism, athenaeums and pedagogically highly innovative schools. Yet this thriving scientific culture, which often crossed social barriers, has been largely ignored by recent historiography. This is the raison d’être of this book: to write a new, genuine urban history of science of Barcelona.

Urban science

The thesis of this book is that the history of Barcelona between 1888 and 1929 cannot be properly understood without accounting for the role of science. So far there have been only some valuable but isolated case studies on the scientific culture of the city.¹³ Our goal is more than simply to add ‘a bit of history of science’, but to provide a new perspective on the cultural makeup of the city and its attempts at modernization. In fact, we do not intend to write a ‘separate’ history of science in Barcelona around 1900. It would make no sense to neatly disjoin these spheres (art, architecture, science, medicine, politics and so on). They need to be understood as a seamless web with numerous intersections. This is obviously a tremendous historiographical challenge and runs the danger of stating truisms such as ‘everything is connected’. Therefore we need to be more precise: what is lacking is not so much a history of Barcelona that also mentions the history of the municipal natural history museum; or the conflictive reception of Darwinism; or the visit of a foreign luminary such as Albert Einstein.¹⁴ What is lacking is an urban history of science of Barcelona. Such a history would have to focus on the specific conditions of knowledge production and circulation in these critical decades around 1900.

Starting in the mid/late nineteenth century, many new institutions, formats, media and technologies enter the urban stage. To name some obvious examples: public museums, urban parks, international exhibitions, electric lighting, private clinics, amusement parks, but also newspapers (only becoming a mass medium in the late nineteenth century) and illustrated journals, evening schools and new places of sociability such as the athenaeum, the cinema and eventually radio. Barcelona’s fin-de-siècle medical doctors, patients and their clinics, public health programmes, anarchist and spiritist circles, amateurs, users, local experts and technological networks formed part of a complex cultural mesh. By means of a selection of actors, sites and scientific practices shaped in this specific urban context, we believe that the overall historical account of the city between 1888 and 1929 can be significantly enriched. Our basic assumption is that the urban space is both: a creator, incubator and facilitator of these practices of knowledge production and circulation but also an object substantially transformed by these practices. As urban scholars have argued, ‘rather than a passive container of institutions and practices, urban space was a complex material and symbolic environment that was shaped by – and that in turn shaped – institutions in historically specific ways’.¹⁵

Our attempt to write a new, genuine urban history of science inscribes itself into the recent ‘urban turn’ in the history of science.¹⁶ This urban turn is a consequence of a more general trend labelled the ‘spatial turn’.¹⁷ The insight that the actual site where knowledge is produced matters has taken centre stage in numerous research projects in the last two or three decades. Historians of science have not only looked at ‘traditional’ sites of knowledge production such as laboratories, observatories and collections (cabinets and museums). They have also shifted their attention to sites such as the field, zoological and botanical gardens, hospitals, churches, princely courts, pubs and coffee houses, libraries, lecture theatres, salons and many more. This spatial turn has also led historians of science to look at ‘sites’ on a larger scale, such as the city, encompassing many of the places above.¹⁸

A spatial approach should tell us to what extent the specific urban setting of Barcelona shaped the practices of our actors and led to the emergence of the media and institutions related to science, technology and medicine. And the other way round: in how far these practices changed the urban environment. It is such a dialectical approach that is required in order to analyse the scientific practices in a particular quarter (Barrio Chino or Eixample), in a specific urban public place (the Parc de la Ciutadella, the central Plaça Catalunya or the Tibidabo mountain) and even in the whole of the city. It is of significance whether anarchists met in the quarter of Sants or the spiritists in the quarter of Gràcia. It matters where the amusement parks were located, where the Barcelonese visited museums and the zoo, and where the sick sought medical advice and treatment. In our volume, a detailed look at the myriad of sites will help us to understand the ways in which scientific knowledge was transferred and appropriated by different actors.

In the following 10 chapters of this book, we reconstruct a host of specific sites. When we speak of a site, we usually think of a very concrete physical place than can be located on a map. It has an address and a material existence, such as an academy, an observatory, a laboratory, an athenaeum or a clinic. Yet this ‘localized’ understanding is insufficient to get hold of the scientific culture of Barcelona in its entirety. Many sites might only be occupied for a certain period of time. An anarchist meeting place m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and maps
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Barcelona historical timeline
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Control – elite cultures
• Part II Resistance – counter-hegemonies
• Part III Networks – experts and amateurs
• Index