Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898-1937

Chris Ealham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134423392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book investigates urban conflict, popular protest and social control in Barcelona during the period 1898-1937. Focusing upon the sources of anarchist power in the city and the role of the organised anarchist movement during the Second Republic the volume concludes with an analysis of the decline of the power of the anarchist movement during the civil war in its identification of the local conditions that made Barcelona into the capital of European anarchism.

1 The making of a divided city

1.1 The limits of the bourgeois urban utopia

If, as has been claimed, Catalonia was, from the nineteenth century, ‘the factory of Spain’, then its capital, Barcelona, was Spain's industrial capital.¹ Barcelona underwent a major transformation from the 1850s as accumulated economic forces burst out beyond the medieval walls that had hemmed the city in around the port and that had long been regarded by urban elites as a physical reminder of a bygone economic system and a barrier to Catalonia's future prosperity.² During what could be described as the progressive phase in bourgeois urbanism, local economic and political elites revealed a determination to construct a modern capitalist city that might reflect the rising social power of the bourgeoisie. This urban vision was nourished by the unalloyed idealism of planners and architects, who postulated that the demolition of the city walls and urban growth would bring unfettered progress, which would maximise the prosperity of all its denizens.³ The most famous of these planners was Ildefons Cerdé, a progressive social thinker whose Utopian and ambitious plan for rational urban development became the blueprint for Barcelona's development in 1859.⁴ Cerdé's plan sought urban renewal in the overcrowded and randomly arranged medieval streets of the Ciutat Vella (Old City), which was to be connected to the nearby industrial satellites that lay beyond the city walls. This would be achieved through the construction of an Eixample (Extension), which, for Cerdé, would become the core of a new socially inclusive, inter-class, functional city in which people from all walks of life would interact amid a new equality and civic unity.⁵

The great contradiction of bourgeois urbanism was that it invested unlimited faith in market forces. The subordination of the urbanisation process to the narrow interests of the local bourgeoisie and landowners ensured that Cerdé's egalitarian goals were a chimera. First, the Ciutat Vella landlords (a term that dignifies those who were often little more than ‘slumlords’) mobilised successfully against Cerdé's urban renewal programme, just as they mobilised against every subsequent reformist urban project. Although some of the old inner-city slums were sacrificed for the construction of Les Rambles, a central thoroughfare and the new vertebral column of the city, connecting the port with the Eixample, housing renewal in the overcrowded city centre was thwarted. Second, capital shortages and an investment crisis hindered the creation of the Eixample; effectively, unregulated markets, property speculation and corruption combined to distort beyond recognition the construction of what Cerdé had envisaged as a rational urban space.⁶

The failure to realise the hopes of the Cerdé Plan underscored the limits of the bourgeois urban project. Whereas the Parisian bourgeoisie, in close alliance with the French state, successfully implemented the Hausmann Plan and thus reshaped Paris in a way that reaffirmed the hegemonic position of capitalist interests,⁷ the urban capitalist development of Barcelona was, from its origins, a marginal industrialisation process that underscored the weaknesses of local industrialists. While Catalonia's relatively dynamic and prosperous agrarian economy had laid the basis for industrial take-off in the early part of the nineteenth century, capital accumulation and the development of finance capital were subsequently retarded by the context of the combined and uneven development of the Spanish economy and the weak internal market provided by the vast unreformed agricultural heartland of the south and central regions of Spain.⁸ This situation was further compounded by the generally indifferent industrial policies adopted during the Restoration monarchy (1875–1923), a centralist, backward-looking and repressive political system. For the most part dominated by the agrarian elite, the Madrid-based state was invariably aloof from, if not hostile to, the modernisation process occurring largely in Spain's periphery.⁹ Lacking both the economic resources and the political will necessary to guide the urbanisation/industrialisation process, the Restoration authorities responded to the demands for reform emanating from the new social classes associated with capitalist modernisation with a blend of electoral falsification, stultifying centralism and physical repression. Nevertheless, the Madrid-based state could offer the Catalan bourgeoisie a degree of stability, at least during the early years of the Restoration, when most of Barcelona's employers uncritically accepted the hegemony of the central state, a number of them serving as the local representatives for the Spanish Conservative and Liberal parties, the ‘dynastic parties’ that alternated in power in Madrid.¹⁰ But the alliance between Catalan big business and the Restoration political class ended abruptly after the so-called ‘Disaster’ of 1898, when Spain's last overseas colonies — Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico — were lost. For Barcelona's industrialists, this was an economic disaster as it signalled the end of their access to lucrative protected overseas markets. For growing numbers of employers, the inability of the Spanish state to find a new ‘place in the sun’ for Catalan exports — and the absence of any coherent industrial policy per se —enhanced the feelings of isolation towards a distant central state that was increasingly accused of pampering the unproductive southern landowners to the detriment of modern capitalist economic interests. These sentiments crystallised around the bourgeois nationalist project of the Lliga Regionalista (Regionalist League). Formed in 1901, the Lliga was the first modern bourgeois political party in Spain, and its new style of populist mass politics established a broad middle-class base that quickly broke the power — in Catalonia at least — of the clientelist political machines that had hitherto plugged into the corrupt central state.¹¹ In the context of the Restoration system, the Lliga was a modernising force in that it aimed to mobilise public opinion behind its plans to overhaul the backward central state and create an autonomous authority capable of reflecting the industrial requirements of Catalonia. In this way, the Lliga hoped to found a new focus for bourgeois urbanising energies and convert Barcelona into of a city of capital. According to La Veu de Catalunya, the Lliga press organ:

Barcelona is, for us, an extraordinary city, the unrivalled city, the city par excellence, the capital, the complete city, the point of radiation for all the trends in national life, whether economic or political, [the] fundamental organ of the people…heart and basis of the race.¹²

Barcelona was to become ‘an immense city’, ‘a great European city’, ‘the Paris of the south’, ‘the ideal city’ with ‘an organic unity’ in which class differences would be submerged in a shared nationalistic endeavour; for Enric Prat de la Riba, the main theorist of bourgeois catalanisme, Barcelona could then become ‘an Imperial city’.¹³ This cult of a ‘Great Barcelona’ (Gran Barcelona)was sponsored by the organic intellectuals of bourgeois nationalism, writers such as Eugeni d'Ors and Gabriel Alomar, who idealised the city in their dreams of ‘Catalonia-city’ (Catalunya-ciutat), with Barcelona at the centre of a fully urbanised and industrialised region. Paying lip service to Cerdé's Utopian view of urbanisation as an integrating, civilising force that would nullify social conflict, these thinkers were enthralled by the prospect of urban-industrial expansion, giving little consideration to the implications of city growth for social fragmentation and conflict.¹⁴ Rather, by invoking universalist ideals, it was asserted that urban development would establish new political freedoms and liberties.¹⁵ Such views appealed to the more pragmatic and prosaic business and political elites, for whom the city was perceived as a physical and material measure of the industrial order and of their own economic, cultural and social power. In short, the local capitalists represented by the Lliga envisioned Barcelona (and Catalonia) as a bourgeois space, free of ‘Spanish’ feudal-agrarian residues, a goal that explains their advocacy of total economic and urban expansion.

When, after the 1901 local elections, the dynastic parties lost political control in the city, the Lliga had an opportunity to mobilise municipal resources behind a programme of bourgeois urbanism, not least because the other main anti-dynastic political force of the day, the demagogic and populist Partido Republicano Radical (Radical Republican Party, popularly known as the Radicals) also advocated a reformist urban project. Notwithstanding formal political differences, which occasioned an often fierce rivalry between the conservative-Catalanist Lliga and the pro-centralist Radicals, both parties sought to use local institutions to foster urban growth, which was widely identified with social progress.¹⁶ Accordingly, from the turn of the century plans were drawn up for the construction of Laietana Way, a long, North American-style business avenue that was built on the ruins of some of the most decrepit streets of the city centre and that greatly assisted capital movements and commerce, as well as providing office space for many of the city's entrepreneurs, financial institutions and employer's groups.¹⁷ Urban reform gathered pace during the time of the Mancomunitat (1913–25), a Catalan authority conceded by the central state that, while being far from autonomous, brought considerable improvements in the urban transport infrastructure of Barcelona and Catalonia and, simultaneously, enhanced the movement of capital and goods.¹⁸ Yet hopes that this essay in self-administration would foster a new bourgeois political hegemony through the planned transformation of urban life were wrecked by the centralising ethos that dominated official life during the Restoration. The limited fiscal powers of local institutions ensured that the blueprints for the transformation of Barcelona's urban morphology devised by bourgeois planners remained on the drawing board.¹⁹ Instead, city space was reorganised by market forces in a thoroughly unplanned and chaotic fashion, principally during the speculative frenzy that preceded the World Exhibitions of 1888 and 1929²⁰ and during World War One, when Catalan employers exploited Spanish neutrality and the disruption in the international commercial status quo to trade with both belligerent camps.²¹ Thus, in the period leading up to the 1930s, accelerated industrial development and economic diversification made Barcelona into a global commercial centre: the city's industrial hinterland was consolidated as many older companies relocated to newer and larger workshops in the growing urban periphery; the urban transport and energy infrastructure was also modernised consonant with this urban sprawl.²²

However, it would be wrong to exaggerate the strengths or the stability of Catalan capitalism. After the ‘Disaster’ and the ensuing economic crisis, a series of shortcomings were thrown into sharp relief: the historical undercapitalisation and limited profitability of industry; the relatively small-scale nature of production, which also shaped the development of newer industries like metallurgy and transport;²³ the frailty of indigenous financial institutions; the poor international competitiveness of exports; the domination of foreign capital in the most advanced industries; and the restricted domestic market within a context of combined and uneven development.²⁴ These features had an enduring impact on the development of capitalism, so that while the 1929 Exhibition allowed for the emergence of several large-scale plants, textile manufacturing, an industry associated with the birth pangs of capitalism, continued to be the city's biggest employer.

However, there were no such barriers to urban population growth. Between 1850 an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Important abbreviations and acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 The making of a divided city
• 2 Mapping the working-class city
• 3 The birth of the republican city
• 4 The proletarian city and the Second Republic
• 5 The struggle to survive: unemployed self-help and direct action during the Republic
• 6 Militarised anarchism, 1932–36
• 7 Cultural battles: class and criminality
• 8 An ‘apolitical’ revolution: anarchism, revolution and civil war
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index