LIVING

El Generalísimo was determined to punish the region for its stalwart Republican opposition during the war. Between 1939 and 1953, the dictator’s fraudulent war councils convicted and executed 3,585 people who fought with Catalunya’s Republican front, including Lluís Companys, the last President of the Generalitat during the Civil War. Tens of thousands more were imprisoned or interned in work camps.

Franco’s repressions weakened and smothered Catalunya, especially in the vitriolic years that immediately followed the war. By all appearances, culturally and economically, the region lay barren. However, when Franco died in 1975, Catalans were well-prepared to reassert their cultural and political heritage thanks to the determination of certain figures and organisations to ensure the survival of their language, culture and way of life.

One reason why Catalans were able to rise above Franco’s obstacles was historical experience. As Jordina Boix of Òmnium Cultural, a Catalan language and culture centre in Barcelona, explained: “If you think about Catalan suppression, you have to look back 300 years, to the War of Succession.” In the aftermath of this war, a two-century quashing of Catalan autonomy, language and culture began, against which Catalans railed, resisting the oppression as best they could.

Following Franco’s victory in 1939, many intellectuals and artists fled Catalunya, choosing exile over the risk of arrest or execution. Rather than turn their back on their homeland, though, Catalans in Europe and America sustained their culture abroad, maintaining tradition, as well as cultivating creative and intellectual discourse in the context of their new environs. Noteworthy were the editorial journals and magazines which published in Catalan, including Edicions Proa, a literary business established in 1928 in Badalona and transplanted to Perpignan after the war. Texts produced by Proa and others, though prohibited, arrived through underground systems to the hands of intellectuals in Catalunya.

Among the most famous Catalan ambassadors of culture, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí produced prolifically, offering glimpses into the Catalan creative ethos otherwise hidden by the blanket Franco threw over the country. Though Dalí eventually supported Franco, Miró maintained his pro-Catalan perspective and identity throughout his career. Among the painter’s most powerful works are the antifranquista ‘Burnt Canvases’, a dark and violent series that bears little resemblance to the painter’s typical use of bright colours and abstraction.