Francoist repression in Catalonia: from executions and language ban to cultural concessions and co-opting

Historians generally agree that the Franco dictatorship can be roughly divided into two halves, with the first characterized by rule by brute force and violent repression, and the second half by opening the country up with new economic policies, yet still remaining a hard-right police state. 

By the second half of the regime, the Catalan language begins to appear more often as expressions of Catalan identity were, instead of being banned outright, depoliticized and co-opted as the dictatorship sought social consensus.

The regime’s social basis after the Civil War is “formed on the repression of the losing side, the defeated,” as Andrew Dowling, Reader in Contemporary Spanish History at Cardiff University, explains to Catalan News.

In the first years following the Civil War, the dictatorship embarked on a programme of “the systematic destruction and public destruction of Catalan language, culture and identity.” This included the changing of street names and institutions and organizations, while the language was prohibited in public spaces. Jaume Claret, a historian and researcher at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, says that the “peasants, workers, unionists, and politicians” bore the brunt of the violent repression, while there was also “persecution of a cultural nature, but we have to put things in perspective,” he says.

“There is a complete ban on any manifestation that breaks this unity of language, culture, and religion that is fixed in Spain,” Claret explains. “Therefore, Catalan autonomy is abolished, even the autonomy of the University of Barcelona is lifted.”

Yet, there were far fewer executions after the war in Catalonia than in Andalusia or Extremadura. The historians explain that this is because of geography, as an estimated 500,000 people crossed the border into France to escape war reprisals. Instead, the repression they faced came in the form of displacement from their homeland. 

In addition, “an absolute clear predominance” of those executed came from the anarchist movement in Catalonia, Dowling says. However, the next most important category is the interior of Catalonia, where mayors and local elected officials of Esquerra Republicana were executed. 

Concessions to Catalan

Yet, despite the authorities’ best attempts to change the language of millions of Catalans, many, possibly most, kept speaking it at home and using it in private settings, and the language did not disappear. 

By the 1960s, the dictatorship needed to change tack and “rebrand” itself, after its early economic policies were “disastrous,” according to Dowling. “As late as the 1950s, Spain had still not recovered the economic position it held in 1936.” The dictatorship went from selling a narrative of “delivering peace” in the first decades, as they put it, to “delivering prosperity to ordinary Spaniards.”

With this shift in focus came a new strategy towards the Catalan culture, including allowing some concessions to the language and other displays of identity that was different to the Spanish one that the regime sought to make uniform across the country. 

By this point, with the dictatorship well established and assured of itself, it then “feels strong enough,” as Claret explains, that it takes a new “contemporary” attitude towards the different regions. It can do this from a position of international legitimacy, thanks to securing agreements with the United States and joining the UN. 

Come the mid-1960s, bookshops were stocking literature in Catalan, including newly published works of poetry and nonfiction, while Dowling even says that the writing of Karl Marx could be purchased in the language. There is also a monthly magazine, Serra d’Or, which becomes widely read and circulated, published completely in the Catalan language. 

There is also a “reappraisal” of the Sardana dance, an undoubted expression of Catalan identity,  which by the second half of the dictatorship is “depoliticized” and instead valued for its “folkloric value” and “Catholic cultural heritage,” Dowling explains. 

All of this comes in the context of a dictatorship having to evolve along with its people. As Jaume Claret puts it, “the dictatorship does not last 40 years thanks to violence.” First it was “imposed by violence,” but it then had to achieve a “certain social consensus.” 

Both historians are also keen to avoid exaggerating the level of concessions that were allowed: “Now, when I say that, it does not mean that it wasn't still a police and military dictatorship,” Dowling says, “but the basis of the Franco regime evolved and transformed.”

“Civil war” within Catalan society

Claret explains that “there were important Catalan political, social, economic, cultural leaders who collaborated with the dictatorship.” 

At the time of the Spanish civil war, Dowling says Catalonia was already “fractured” as there was “a kind of civil war within Catalan society.” Anarchism was huge in Barcelona during the 1930s, and for many, Francoism, which restored bourgeois and traditional authority and the power of the Catholic church, was the preferred alternative to full anarchist revolution. 

“That doesn't mean that those people want to see Franco in power for 36 years,” Dowling points out, “but that was the choice they faced.”

From fracture to unity

Just as many elements of Catalan society embraced Francoism from an early stage, some elements that would have traditionally been seen as aligned with the regime instead turned against it and joined the chorus calling for change. 

As the dictatorship neared its end, it began to be met with a more emboldened opposition, and a secret gathering of a very diverse group of dissidents, many of whom became distinguished politicians, lawyers, and cultural figures years later, resulted in the creation of the Assemblea de Catalunya, the Assembly of Catalonia.

While in Spain, unity among socialists and communists couldn’t be established until “almost the very end” of the dictatorship, the different groups had found consensus in Catalonia already by the 1960s and were able to forge a stronger, united opposition to the regime.

The Assembly of Catalonia is “overwhelmingly dominated” by the communists, Dowling says, “but it meets in the Monastery of Montserrat.” For the Welsh historian, this represents a “re-encounter between two different cultures that were on opposite sides in the Spanish Civil War,” as “communists and Catholics would have been simply inconceivable as acting in some way together” before that point. 

Towards the end of the regime, Dowling says that “Catalan society develops in a very important way to achieve a social, cultural, and political unity.”