Memoria republicana y memoria católica. Cuestión religiosa y conmemoración pública en la Barcelona republicana (1931-1936).

Abstract

This article considers the debate on the religious conflict in Republican-period Barcelona from a new perspective. More precisely, it examines how public memory provided a privileged symbolic backdrop for the struggle between the secular model and the Catholic model. The author analyses the unfolding of a new commemorative account, which expressed Republican, nationalist, working-class and lay sympathies. It describes the secularization of time and space carried out by the city’s political and cultural elites, under the leadership of ERC (Republican Left of Catalonia). However, it maintains that there is a grammar and narrative semantics with Judeo-Christian echoes underlying this new republican memory. At the same time, it emphasises the efforts of Catholic citizens to maintain their visibility in the public space, precisely by means of the defence of their own culture of memory. The author also studies the position of the leading political forces of the time (ERC and the Lliga Regionalista) before the religious question, as well as their differing hermeneutics of the Catalan tradition. This research has been undertaken on the basis of a wide range of contemporary journalistic, bibliographical and administrative sources. The text considers the relationship between Republicanism and Catholicism from a new standpoint and offers a novel overview of social mind-sets and political activity in Barcelona under the Second Spanish Republic.