Ideology and the use of History; Why the Memory of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War is Appropriated in Anarchist Literature and Catalan Nationalism

Abstract

This thesis investigates the way the history of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War is appropriated in Catalan nationalism and anarchist literature. The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, when Francisco Franco led a military coup against the democratically elected government. The anarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT was important in stopping Franco’s coup attempt in Catalonia and had gained substantial public support and power in the process. After stopping the coup in, among others, Catalonia, it attempted to enact an anarchist revolution. The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, when the rebels had completely conquered Spain. Franco would rule the country as a dictator until his death in 1975. Due to Franco’s censorship, and the “pact of forgetting” which was agreed upon following the democratization of Spain, a memory conflict has broken out. Through the investigation of two Catalan “democratic memory” foundations and two works of anarchist literature, it has been concluded that both anarchists and Catalanists attempt to change images of the past to further own goals in strikingly similar ways. Both paint a rosy picture of the history of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, favourable to their own ideology in attempt to create “imagined communities”.