BARCELONA

Until the end of the eighteenth century Barcelona had a long tradition in the production and overseas trade of textiles. Textile and wine production represented the two most important sectors of the Catalan economy. In the textile industry, the effects of early industrialization were evident in signs of workers' unrest. Peasants and workers from factories outside the Barcelona wall kept migrating to the city looking for jobs in the mills. Unemployment, taxes, and high corn prices caused the food riots of March 1789. In this year 130,000 people lived in cramped conditions inside the city walls.

Barcelona began the nineteenth century with an economic disaster. Spain had sided with the French during the Napoleonic Wars, which brought about a British blockade of Spanish trade with America. The corresponding slowdown in textile and wine production caused widespread unemployment. Exports to the American colonies declined drastically, from 20 million pesetas in 1804 to fifty thousand in 1807. When Napoleon's army occupied the peninsula from 1804 to 1814, Catalonia refused to acknowledge the French monarch who seized the throne. Like the rest of the cities in the peninsula, Barcelona was occupied, but resistance in the countryside continued. The French presence made Catalans reconsider the future course of their state. In 1810 a national parliament met in Cadiz and laid the basis for a new liberal bourgeois state. However, when King Ferdinand VII (r. March–May 1808, 1814–1833) returned in 1814, he effectively allied with the church, the nobility, and other conservative groups to block liberal reform.

city changes and convent burning

The changes to Old Barcelona during the nineteenth century were the result of the French occupation, of the continuous attacks on the symbols of royal authority and the church, and of town planning by liberal politicians. During the French occupation, convents and monasteries were emptied and used as barracks, stores, and stables. The fourteenth-century convent of Jonqueres became a military hospital. The Cementiri de l'Est (Eastern Cemetery) was inaugurated on a plot of land on the outskirts of the city. Although initially opposed by many, by the end of the century it became accepted as one of Barcelona's landmarks. In 1820, during a brief period of liberalism, a project to improve the status of the Barri Gotic (Gothic Quarter) began. The squares of Plaça Reial, the Plaça Sant Jaume, and the Carrer de Ferran marked the first stage of the project. The project of the Plaça Sant Jaume required the demolition of one of the finest Romanesque churches in Barcelona, the Church of Sant Jaume. In 1821 a paved street, a continuation of the line of the Ramblas, was designed to link the Ramblas with the village of Gracia, thus emerging as the Paseo de Gracia. This area became popular among the upper middle classes when a park called the Camps Elisis was built in 1853 next to the Paseo de Gracia. This new site replaced the Jardi del General, which was located in the port area, as the most attractive place for Barcelonese social life. The Camps Elisis offered extensive promenades among fountains, inns, dance halls, and an open theater. As the botanical gardens were moved out of the walls in 1834, a breach was opened for the first time in the city walls to connect the gardens with the Paseo de Gracia.

When Ferdinand VII died, a conflict over the legitimacy of the Bourbon succession broke out in 1833. In the summer of 1835 revolutionary mobs who opposed absolutism burned many convents; among them the great Cistercian abbey of Poblet, the Benedictine monastery of Sant Cugat del Valles, and the Carthusian convents of Scala Dei and Montalegre. In Barcelona, angry crowds destroyed the interior of the church and convent of the Carme. Infuriated workers attacked the first steam factory of Spain, the Bonaplata works, burning it down.

In 1837 the liberal government declared that all church land inside the city walls could be sold by auction. The entrepreneurship of the bourgeoisie who had acquired this land brought about the destruction of important buildings: the Royal Chapel of Saint Agatha, the sixteenth-century Convent of Saint Joseph and the fourteenth-century Convent of Saint Mary of Jerusalem. Only then did the city have space for the emergence of new buildings that would enhance Barcelona's cultural life. The Theater del Liceu was originally built in 1847 on the site of an old convent. Although the Liceu was destroyed by a fire in 1861, the construction of a new edifice within a year indicates the importance that the city's elites placed on opera. The Palau de la Música Catalana was built on the site of the Church of Saint Vincent de Paul to house a musical organization called Orfeó Català. The Plaça Reial was designed by Francesc-Daniel Molina i Casamajo, modeled after residential squares of France. The shine of the Plaça Reial darkened after 1880, when the bourgeoisie who had occupied its luxurious apartments moved to the Eixample, the new urban development of the city. The municipality established a committee in 1848 to control the building of highways. Between 1840 and 1860 the railway expanded, and a modern port opened to allow for the growth of trade.

social unrest and anarchism

In 1843 the Barcelonese revolted against the liberal government. The insurrection became known as the Pastry Cooks' revolt because it began as a small merchant and artisan protest influenced by socialists, and later became an integral part of Catalan politics from the 1840s onward.

Barcelona's population rose to 189,000 in 1850. The living and working conditions for workers in Barcelona worsened; wages decreased 11 percent between 1849 and 1862. In 1854, after a cholera epidemic, many enraged unemployed industrial workers took part in the demolition of the city walls, which were seen as a symbol of oppression. Malnutrition, sickness, and appalling living conditions were the norm among the working class. By the end of the century anarchist ideas had permeated the workers in Barcelona. Throughout the 1890s Barcelona saw a continuous chain of bomb explosions. The targets of these attacks were the authorities and the rich. One bomb exploded during an opera at the Liceu, killing fourteen people. Another spectacular episode occurred when a bomb was thrown at a religious procession on the feast of Corpus Christi in 1896. The authorities responded with a general roundup of anarchists and anticlericals, some of whom who were tortured in Montjuic. Some of them were convicted and executed, while others were sent into exile.

tragic week

The 1898 loss of Cuba to the United States was one of the biggest humiliations in Spanish history. This event had important repercussions for Catalan industry; without colonial markets, the economic growth of Barcelona slowed. Several sectors of Catalan society demanded drastic government reforms. By 1900 class warfare was the biggest threat to Barcelona's economic and political progress. A violent episode of mass revolts known as the "Tragic Week" occurred in Barcelona on July 1909. Eighty buildings were set on fire, most of them convents and parish churches. Although it is clear that the power and influence of the church in secular matters was challenged, Catalan regionalism also played an important role.

catalanism

In the 1860s several intellectuals, inspired by the idea that Catalan culture was under attack from foreign influence, began a campaign to revive interest in folk culture—literature, language, and music—where, according to them, the roots of Catalanism laid. This idealization of the Catalan past was the origin of a cultural movement called the Renaixença (the Renaissance or rebirth). Anselm Clere, a musician with political interests, contributed to the emergence of a new appreciation for popular songs. In poetry, Antoni de Bofarull i de Brocà promoted the work of poets in Catalan. In 1859 the Salo de Cent de Barcelona hosted a literary showcase called the Jocs Florals, whose origin dated from the Middle Ages. During the first ten years of the Restoration, Catalanism was transformed from a cultural movement into a political one. The first Catalan-language newspaper was founded in Barcelona in 1879. Three years later, a political party called Centre Català was founded and became the unifying organization for Catalanist aspirations.

gold fever

Between 1876 and 1883 there was a surge in economic growth; production in the cotton industry tripled and sixteen new banks were created. During this period, known as the Febre d'Or, or "gold fever," massive amounts of credit were used to finance railroads, mines, and urbanization. The largest urban-planning project of the century was commissioned to Ildefons Cerdà, a civil engineer who firmly believed that the embrace of technological innovations—gas, steam, and electricity—could improve peoples' living conditions. Unlike other European cities, Barcelona's old city did not need to be altered because there was open space between the city and the adjacent towns that surrounded the city. Modern Barcelona has been the result of a process of conurbation—the city growing outward, and the hinterland towns growing to meet it. The Eixample, as the new part of the city is called, was a grid with no relation to the old city. A modular city with no center, it could be expanded without apparent limits. Cerdà's contemporary critics found his project vulgar and monotonous. On 4 October 1860 Queen Isabella II (r. 1833–1868) laid the first stone of the Eixample. By 1872 there were around one thousand residential buildings housing forty thousand people. The buildings were not equipped with proper drainage and water supply; as a result, by 1890 the Eixample was regularly hit by epidemics of cholera and typhoid. Cerdà had planned for structures 57 feet high, but already by 1891 new building codes allowed 65-foot constructions.

In 1870 two public markets were built: the Mercat del Born and the Mercat de Sant Antoni. In the Eixample, the new University of Barcelona was built in 1868 under the design of architect Elias Rogent i Amat. This building was an amalgam of architectural styles, but its Catalan Romanesque reflected national sensibilities emphasized by intellectuals of the Renaixenca. La Ciutadella (The Citadel) had survived the destruction of the Bourbon walls early in the century. During the Revolution of 1868 La Ciutadella was destroyed, and a public park and private housing was built on its site.

the universal exposition

By 1883 the Catalan economic boom came to an end. A plague that had destroyed French vineyards reached Catalonia, where it destroyed the industry almost in its totality. The situation worsened when a crisis at the Paris stock exchange drove the Catalan economy into a recession. Migration to Barcelona was a consequence of fewer opportunities in the region. While in 1887 one of seven Catalans lived in the city, by 1900 one in four Catalans lived in Barcelona. By 1834 the population was 135,000, and by 1900 it had risen to 500,000. The Exposition of 1888 was organized with the hope of bringing fast relief to the stagnant economy. The most important symbol of Barcelona was the statue of Christopher Columbus built in the Place del Portal de la Pau. Nineteenth-century Catalans believed that Columbus was Catalan. It is significant that the statue is pointing to the sea with its back to Castile, a gesture of the tension that existed between the central government in Madrid and Catalonia. Several avenues were urbanized to prepare the city for the major event. In

1882 the Passeig de Colom was the first street in the city to have electric light. Given the lack of first-class lodgings, the Gran Hotel International was a much-needed structure for the occasion. It was built in fifty-three days and was not able to satisfy the demand for lodging. The Exposition remained opened for nine months and attracted around six thousand people a day.

modernism

The last decade of the nineteenth century brought a sense of confidence in the economic prospects for the future. Nevertheless, labor strikes and anarchist attacks darkened the optimism of the middle classes. The colonias industrials were built in response to workers' demands. In these communal factory towns, the bosses would provide food, education, housing, and medical assistance. Eusebi Güell, one of the richest entrepreneurs in Catalonia, commissioned Antoni Gaudi for the construction of the church in the mill town that Güell was building to improve living and working conditions. In the 1890s a group of very talented and imaginative architects gave the city some of the most important buildings of the century. Catalan modernism was a combination of styles—mainly Gothic and Arabic—that found its inspiration in the past. The most remarkable landmark of early Modernista architecture is the Café-Restaurant by architect Lluis Domenech i Montaner. In this building, he defied architectural standards by using mostly brick, a material considered unattractive. Domenech was commissioned to design several private residences: the Editorial Montaner i Simon, the Casa Tomas, and the Casa Iuster. His biggest project was the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, or Hospital of the Holy Cross and Saint Paul. This project was welcomed by the Barcelonese, who until 1900 did not have an acceptable general hospital. Domenech wanted to create an original and appealing building in order to break with the similarities between hospitals and prisons.

The next great architect of Barcelona was Josep Puig i Cadafalch. He was mostly interested in High Gothic style. His most remarkable works are also private residences: the Casa de les Punxes, or the House of Points, built in 1903–1905, and the Casa Amatller in 1898. Antoni Gaudi is still considered by many the most grandiose architect of Catalan origin since the Middle Ages. The Guell park was commissioned to Gaudi when he was fifty years old. This project was originally designed to become a high-income housing enterprise. With the construction materials and designs used in the park, Gaudi made a statement on Catalan nationalism. Gaudi saw Catalans as inherently different from all other Spaniards in all respects. Gaudi remodeled La Casa Batllo for the textile tycoon Josep Batllo. After this project, he began the Casa Mila', known as La Pedrera, or "The Stone Quarry." His project of crowning the building with a gigantic sculpture of the Virgin Mary was canceled in response to the events of the Tragic Week. In 1884 Gaudi started working on the Sagrada Familia (Holy Family), a project that had been started by another architect. According to Catholic conservatives, the Sagrada Familia was meant to be a place of prayer and contrition for the sins of modernism that were displacing the traditional world. It was never finished for lack of funds. Gaudi begged from door to door for money to complete the project. Japanese foundations and Spanish Catholics still contribute to its construction with important sums, but it remains incomplete.

See alsoCities and Towns; Spain.

bibliography

Connelly Ullman, Joan. The Tragic Week: A Study of Anti-clericalism in Spain, 1875–1912. Cambridge, Mass., 1968.

Ealham, Chris. Class, Culture, and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898–1937. London, 2005.

Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. Barcelona: A Thousand Years of the City's Past. London, 1991.

Hughes, Robert. Barcelona. New York, 1992.

Thomson, J. K. J. A Distinctive Industrialization: Cotton in Barcelona, 1728–1832. New York, 1992.

Wray McDonogh, Gary. Good Families of Barcelona: A Social History of Power in the Industrial Era. Princeton: N.J., 1986.

Eloina M. Villegas Tenorio