What Do These People Want?

In a year's time Spain faces a Franco issue. "El Caudillo" died on 20 November, 1975. Does the fortieth anniversary merit some form of honour, if only an acknowledgment? It is doubtful that it will, but there will nevertheless be those who consider the anniversary worthy of more than a footnote to official business.

Franco may be long dead, but his memory lingers. The Amnesty Law which followed his death can be dubbed the amnesia law, as it assisted in creating the collective loss of memory decreed by the newly democratic but unreconciled Spain. But this memory loss didn't extend to the extinguishing of all Francoist sympathies or indeed the evidence of physical manifestations of the regime. It wasn't until the Zapatero administration sought to remove these concrete or symbolic reminders via its law of historic memory that the statues started to be pulled down. The current government reduced the budget for this to zero.

The shadow cast by this lingering memory is such that for some Franco never died. As with Elvis, who followed him a couple of years later, there is doubtless a guy working down the chip shop who swears he's Franco. The years of linger are reminiscent of the months of linger prior to his passing in 1975. These were such that US television news would make repeated reference to Franco still being alive. Chevy Chase on "Saturday Night", the comedy show which was to later become "live", adopted and rephrased this - "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead".

Those months of lingering death and indeed years of failing health represented a period of uncertainty not just to the future but also to the present. Who was in charge and what actually were they in charge of? It was also a period during which a dying regime and its fellow travellers would show their spite and attempt to assert their fading authority, and there were two incidents which occurred forty years ago this month which demonstrate this.

At around about a quarter past midnight on 22 November, 1974 a bomb exploded at the offices of the "Diario de Mallorca". There were no injuries, but it was the third attack of some description on the newspaper in less than a month, the second of which involved the daubing of graffiti that was reproduced elsewhere in Palma. It read: "Tácito. No. Falange". Tácito was a reference to a group of intellectuals, politicians and journalists who, as the death of Franco neared, sought democratic solutions and who took to print in espousing them. The Falange, Franco's one-time Thought Police, didn't take at all kindly to them.

The Falange was very much one of the regime's fellow travellers, but it had been on the death bed a lot longer than Franco. Its power had been diminishing from the early 1960s, but it also lingered. It is a mark, however, of the extent to which the Falange was distanced from the regime that the conservative "ABC" newspaper could openly report the bombing as the work of the Falange. As such, it was indicative of the extent to which the full apparatus of the Franco dictatorship had been undermined and had been crumbling from the 1960s when tourism and pressing economic needs had brought about new thinking. Yet, it was an element associated with the dictatorship which viewed the potential for democracy with horror and so made its desperate final attempts to assert itself.

The other incident concerns Mallorca's greatest folk singer, María del Mar Bonet. On 7 November, 1974 she was arrested in Barcelona, accused of having been spreading subversive propaganda. It was not the first time she had encountered problems. In 1971 she had been arrested after a concert in Zaragoza and had been subjected to, in her words, "an horrific interrogation". She was held overnight and no longer, and nothing was to really come of her detention three years later. But it was a reminder of how the regime, though in its death throes, could still not stomach any criticism. Her main crime was to have put the music to and have sung "Què volem aquesta gent?" (what do these people want?), a song dedicated to Enrique Ruano, a student, anti-Franco militant who had died in police custody in 1969.

But what the regime could stomach even less than the criticism was Bonet's popularity. She was by then nationally and internationally acclaimed. Her arrest in 1974 was proof of its desperation and of final displays of malice, which brought scorn from the international community and increasingly from a Spanish one as well.

Franco believed that Juan Carlos would carry his legacy forward. He was wrong. The spitefulness of the bombing and the arrest, the rise of Tácito were all evidence of a regime and ideology on the point of collapse. There was to be no other way than democracy.

Photo: Maria del Mar Bonet in her younger days.

What Is The Truth?: Francesc de Borja Moll

A publishing house closed last month. It was eighty years old and was one of Mallorca's most important and most famous publishing companies. Its name was, and remains for the time being, Editorial Moll. It had been battling against financial difficulties for some years, had been placed in administration and, despite fundraising efforts, finally lost the battle. As part of the process of liquidation, buyers are likely to be sought for the collection of hundreds of thousands of books at its headquarters. Included among this vast collection is the "Diccionari català-valencià-balear", a work of enormous significance in that it was the first dictionary to bring together different strands of Catalan. It was a work which had been started by Antoni Maria Alcover, who died in 1932, and which was finally completed in 1962 by the person after whom the company was named - Francesc de Borja Moll Casanovas.

The timing of the founding of Editorial Moll in 1934 was both good and bad; good because it was during the period of the Second Republic, bad because of what happened two years later. Under the Republic, Catalan could flourish, and Editorial Moll was a publishing house for Catalan. So, given the bad timing, what happened to the company and to its founder once the Franco regime and the Falange set about their prohibition and persecution of Catalan?

My own knowledge of Borja Moll goes back some years. I came to know about him because he, like Antoni Maria Alcover, is afforded high levels of reverence in Mallorca, especially Alcover. I confess, however, that until now and with an interest sparked off by the closure of Editorial Moll, I had never paid over much attention to his background. And so, it was with more than a little surprise that I found a lengthy article by an historian, Mariano Bendito Saura, that was posted on his blog in 2011 and which was entitled "The historical-linguistic misrepresentations of Francesc de Borja Moll" **.

The company, it would appear, didn't encounter any great difficulties and nor did Borja Moll. And that was because, and Bendito is not the only one to have asserted this, he was a member of the Falange. Bendito says that during the Civil War Borja Moll was in the propaganda department of the Falange and goes on to say that in 1940 he collaborated on a project which was sponsored, among others, by Pilar Primo de Rivera, sister of the founder of the Falange and therefore daughter of the 1920s' dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera. This project was a propaganda exercise to promote the notion of Catalan fascism and a unitary Catalan and language.

Bendito's article, apart from being lengthy, is complex and far from straightforward. It devotes attention to detail of linguistic development and cites innumerable references to this development and to political interference and orders. But at the start of the article, he makes his sentiments clear. "Borja Moll (director of Editorial Moll, ex-Falangist from Palma de Mallorca ...) is an unethical and dishonest person who sold Catalan imperialism and who betrayed and disowned all Balearic historical and linguistic truth." He implies, therefore, that "Catalanisation" of the islands' languages was an invention but was one which re-emerged from 1970 in a very different political and cultural form.

Bendito, who describes himself as being "passionate for historical truth", paints a picture of Borja Moll which is hard to reconcile with what he achieved, e.g. founding the Obra Cultural Balear in 1962 or the grand honour for Catalan "letters" in 1971, and with what Editorial Moll became, a publishing house of great significance which promoted Catalan and which over its eighty years published works by names of cultural and historical importance such as Alcover and the poet Miquel Costa i Llobera. Perhaps Borja Moll had been put under pressure by the Falange. He wouldn't have been the only one. Whatever his involvement, it didn't last, and nor did the strict anti-Catalan dogma that the Franco regime initially pursued with such rigour.

The article does, however, point to complex linguistic arguments which, while somewhat obscure and arcane, inform so much of current-day arguments in Mallorca, those to do with language, culture and education. Bendito is not unique in presenting a version of history which seeks to debunk a Mallorcan link to Catalan (and thus Catalonia) and to the notion of the Catalan Lands. The problem is, and with the greatest of respect to him and to his research, getting at the "truth" is made difficult because of how current-day politics create fertile ground for competing versions of history. His version is firmly in the anti-Catalanist camp.

Editorial Moll folded because of financial difficulties, and one source of these difficulties was the elimination of regional government support for books in Catalan. Borja Moll's son says that this stemmed from "the government's extreme belligerence towards Catalan". Politics, always politics.

** http://historiaregnemallorca.blogspot.com.es/2011/04/tergiversaciones-historico-linguistas.html

Spring Backward: Mallorca's tragic spring of 1936

Spring. In one regard, there is no such thing as a Mallorcan spring. In tourism terms, there is winter and there is summer, two seasons determined not by equinoxes or solstices but by employment contracts and by flight and tour operator programmes. "The season" is typically taken (officially even) as starting on 1 May, more or less halfway through spring, but it marks the start of summer, just as 1 November - and the appropriate connotations of the day of the dead - signals the start of winter.

Spring. It has so many meanings. Renewal, rebirth, advance. Even the aide- mémoire for instruction as to which way the clocks are changed hints at advance: spring forward, though it is possible to also spring backward. Advance, renewal and rebirth, they are words of optimism, and the word "spring" has been attached to optimistic movements, those of hoped-for renewal and advance, yet which have proved that optimism can soon be lost. Spring backward. Spring is renewal. It is also revolution. Prague Spring, Arab Spring, the Spring of Nations, the latter a reference to the revolutions of 1848 which swept across Europe, only for them to collapse a year later.

Mallorca has had its own "Spring". It wasn't an optimistic spring, it was the "primavera trágica". 1936. With tragedy evident across Spain, Mallorca was caught up in the prelude to the coup in July and the Civil War. Getting a handle on how this tragic spring played out in Mallorca helps to give a better appreciation of just what Mallorca was like in 1936, because there is often an erroneous view of the island in the mid-1930s - one which suggests an indifference towards politics as a whole and so, therefore, to the politics of the mainland.

In the spring of 1936, working the land dominated the island's economic landscape, but agriculture was not as dominant as it had been even thirty years before, when some 70% of the economy was tied to the land. Urbanisation was such that 30% of the population lived in Palma alone, while industrial development, including tourism, had made significant inroads into a predominantly agrarian economy. Far from being populated by ignorant and apathetic peasants, Mallorca had a wealthy and educated middle-class and a network of workers' organisations. In other words, the island, though still mainly rural, possessed enough ingredients for modern attitudes and beliefs to take hold, which, at that time, included Republicanism.

Mallorca was then, as it still is, a conservative place. Though the cause of Republicanism on the island had been advanced considerably by 1936, it was a minority movement. Electorally, Calvia and Palma were exceptions rather than the rule in the February municipal elections of that year in returning Republicans (for the national election, no Republican was returned). An innate conservatism, perhaps because of the traditional agrarianism, perhaps because of insularity, held sway.

Despite this conservatism, two minority influences were to enter the equation. Over the course of the spring, Communist membership doubled. Though there was a significant Communist protest march in Palma, the Communists were not the main instigators of the violence that was to break out. Its primary cause were the pockets of the Falange who had arrived on the island in 1934. The Falange, a curious mix of its own republicanism, arch-Catholicism but also modernism, barely even registered in the 1936 elections. It had secured only around 200 votes across the Balearics; conservative, right-wing Mallorca was not about to embrace it. In March, the national government proscribed it. This, as much as anything else, was the signal for the outbreak of the tragic spring. Though the press attempted to portray Mallorca as being peaceful, it couldn't ignore acts of violence from Palma to Campanet to Porreres. A reason why some commentators and historians refer to Mallorca's "primavera trágica" is because it unleashed the violence it did on an island unused to such turmoil, largely because of the Falange. Clandestine though it became, it could count on as many members as the Communists; more in fact. In June, less than two weeks before spring became summer, a Falange bomb went off at the Casa del Pueblo in Palma.

A tragic spring might seem like an odd way to introduce a Mallorcan spring, but not really. The circumstances of the Civil War and of its prelude hold a fascination, if not necessarily for the best of reasons. And around the island there are places which have a perhaps surprising and certainly unwanted connection with events leading up to the Civil War and with the rise of the Falange. Sant Martí de Lanzell in Vilafranca de Bonany, one of the most important and oldest "possession" country estates in Mallorca, Vallgornera Vell in Llucmajor, Son Vivot in Inca, now an agrotourism rural hotel; these were, from March 1936, locations for pockets of the Falange to prepare for armed intervention. Spring backward.

* I am indebted to an article by David Ginard i Féron for information here. http://www.historica.cat/?p=6155