Barcelona (EFE).- The journalist Andreu Farràs reviews in “Roses de Foc de Barcelona” (edicions 62) the riots that occurred, especially in Barcelona, between 1835 and 1937, a detailed analysis that ends with an epilogue on the riots after the sentence of the procés and that leads the author to affirm: “Catalonia has always been a nuisance for Spanish politics”.
After carefully reviewing more than a hundred years of Catalan history, Farràs rescues a phrase from the Count of Romanones in 1910, when he said: “There is not a minute that we do not have to deal with Catalonia, if we had to treat all regions like Catalonia we would not be able to govern”.
The serious incidents unleashed after the Supreme Court ruling on the case of the procés in 2019 were the starting point for this book and, specifically, a graffiti: “Barcelona is once again the rose of fire”.
The phrase had been coined in the Tragic Week by the journalist Antonio Loredo, who worked for the anarchist publication “Tierra y libertad”.
From here it is inevitable to look for parallels between the “episodes of social and political anger” meticulously recorded by Farràs for little more than a hundred years and the very serious incidents that followed the sentence of the procés.
The first riot (“bullanga” in Catalan) was preceded by the social unrest caused by the first Carlist war and the struggle between liberals and absolutists and the trigger was a bullfight, which turned out tame, on July 25, 1835, in the Barceloneta.
In a few hours, in Catalonia, 21 convents were set on fire and 97 people lost their lives, seventy of them were religious, and for the reader to have a more precise idea of what that means, Farràs calculates that, depending on the population, These deaths would be equivalent to more than 700 deaths from political violence in 2022.
Not all the victims of those episodes of social rage were “necessarily” involved in the events, it was often minors who suffered “a furious repression” and he recalls: “Before the demonstrations were dissolved by shots.”
All the episodes have a common setting, Barcelona, in streets and corners that we can still recognize today, offering a new historical itinerary.
For example, the Plaza del Teatro, which would later have a monument dedicated to the playwright Serafí Pitarra (1839-1895), was the place where the tame bull ended up that the enraged crowd dragged through the streets of Barcelona in the first riot and, days later, he did the same in this place with the body of General Pere Nolasc de Bassa Girona, military governor of Barcelona.
Many revolts have common denominators: social inequality, low wages, enormous public insanity, precariousness and labor exploitation together with child labor, are ingredients of an explosive cocktail in a city without sewers, contaminated by factories and walled.
Walls that the military authority always wanted to maintain in order to control the outbursts of Catalan anger that caused so many headaches for the Spanish governments.
To the point that the author has calculated that, between 1814 and 1900, 70% of the time, Catalonia and Barcelona were in a state of exception, siege or with suspended constitutional guarantees.
In addition, during many of these years, 25% of the Army troops were stationed in Catalonia, which, however, then represented 10% of the Spanish population.
Farràs recalls that, almost after each outbreak of social violence, a government crisis followed one another in Spain and, to give the closest example in time, although the first cause of the motion of censure of the PSOE against the PP government of Mariano Rajoy in 2018 was corruption, it is also true that then he had the support of the Catalan separatists, all this after the referendum of 1-O 2017.
One of the graffiti from the 2019 revolts after the procés sentence said “no state will make us free”, which reminds us that those incidents had, in addition to the pro-independence component, accents of anarchism and job insecurity, especially for young people, all contributes to an “outrage explosion.”
And if in 1835 some tame bulls were the trigger for a deep malaise, it is easy to make a comparison with soccer and the Negreira case.
At this point, Andreu Farràs does not shy away from asking himself, “what would happen if UEFA expels FC Barcelona from international competitions? It is, of course, entering the field of speculation, but another explosion cannot be ruled out.”
Andreu Farràs has worked, among other media, at El Periódico de Catalunya and Avui, has been a professor of journalism at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and won an Ondas award for the report “El 23-F des de dins” (TV3 ) and another from the Barcelona Provincial Council for a docuseries on the Civil War (Betevé).
He is the author, among other books, of “The Güells”, “The Catalan Oasis”, “The Lift”, “The Invisibles” and “El 23-F a Catalunya”.